Chetan Sharma has a post up on a panel he chaired at the PAN-IIT event on “Mobile Advertising - Technical Challenges and Business Opportunities”. An interesting thing to look at is what the mobile advertising industry was forecast to be by 2005 by analysts at the turn of the century—between $890 million and $6.8 billion. In 2006 the actual mobile advertising market was $421 million. On the panel everyone was bullish about the industry (not surprising since they’re all in the industry, Infospace, Medio, Google, Voicebox) but they cautioned it will take time because the “reach” is not there yet.

A comparison was made with Japan: “Japanese Mobile Advertising market: Clearly, Japan has had more experience with Mobile Advertising than rest of the markets. In 2006, the average revenue/user/year stood at around $4. For US, this figure was less than $1.”

It was also pointed out that there is no single thing that is meant by “mobile advertising”, as it ranges from push-SMS to pre-roll video ads to recommendation engines, and everything in between. This means that conversations about it can sometimes be disconnected—one person refers to mobile advertising as spam while another is considering video sponsorship. It’s generally agreed that the industry needs to focus on user needs rather than CPC and CPM, which is a common refrain that becomes challenged when companies demand to see some accountability for how their advertising dollars are spent.

Kosar Jaff, Engineering Manager at Google, “described the concept of “signals” that Google uses to discern “intent” and how mobile presents a great experimentation field to test some search techniques and algorithms that can also be applied to online search at a later date”. Because there is a low threshold for wrong answers on mobile it’s easier to discern when something works and when it doesn’t. (via Mobile Weblog on Buzz Marketing)