Those pesky ads that show up when you're playing games on your mobile phone are about to multiply.
Mobile-ad spending in the U.S. is projected to rise to 80 percent this year, to $2.61 billion, according to AdAge.com.
AdAge.com took a new report by eMarketer that estimates that mobile-ad spending reached $1.45 billion in 2011, up from $769.6 million in 2010, and that "Google is getting more than half of the pie."
The culprit? The increased sales of smartphones.
EMarketer's mobile analyst Noah Elkin noted that the widespread adoption of both iPhones (37.04 million were sold worldwide in the last quarter, which was documented in Apple's earnings call last night) and Android devices in the past year was also a contributing factor, reports AdAge.com writer Cotton Delo.
In December 2011, Mashable.com writer Todd Wasserman reported that Facebook may begin experimenting with mobile advertising in March, with a launch right before the company's planned IPO, according to a report.
The ads would appear in users' mobile news feeds, kind of like, the "Sponsored Stories" Facebook users see on a regular-sized computer.
Facebook could have the upper hand in comparison to Google and Apple, among others who have already launched mobile ad campaigns.
Facebook knows it users and gather their information in the form of "likes," so the social media giant will know what types of advertisement to use in targeting individuals.
While company's mobile advertising budgets are prediected to increase, traditional online advertising still dominates.
Google currently controls about 24 percent of the $630 million in 2011 U.S. mobile display advertising revenues, according to IDC. Apple's share is 15 percent, reports Mashable.com.
So why the lag in creating mobile ad campaigns?
For one thing, writes Forbes staff writer Eric Savitz "mobile campaigns take a lot of effort to create and to create well. But perhaps more importantly, it's very difficult to buy easily at scale.
"With so many different platforms –- from iPhones to tablets to Android's multitudes of models -– it's difficult to build an ad that you know will be effective. But new standardizations that will become popular in the next year, such as the IAB's MRAID, and liquidity through real-time bidding and consolidation will help address these perceived problems, and bring agency spend into the market at scale for the first time."
