The Mobile Medium Coming Of Age (And Size)

U.S Trails In Percentage Of Usage Compared To European Stats, But Not For Long

By David Miranda

The mobile medium, in the U.S., is on the verge of becoming a powerful and ubiquitous marketing channel in much the same way it become in Europe and Asia. This fact is confirmed by a recently survey by M:Metrics and a conclusion by its CEO below.

"The growing adoption of major brands using SMS and the substantial consumer response rates indicate a couple of important trends: mobile as a commercial medium is on steroids; and multimedia convergence is real." - Will Hodgman, CEO, M:Metrics

The above statistical chart shows clearly the penetration of content and applications by the over 220 million mobile subscribers in the U.S. with almost 74 million consumers or 38%, for example, utilizing text messaging. This number, albeit growing exponentially, still pales by comparison to statistics in the U.K. (85%), Spain (83%), Germany (81%), and France (71%) respectively.

What does this mean for marketers? It means that if mobile is not currently an integral part of your marketing strategy, better get busy at extending your brand to the mobile channel or risk deferring first-mover advantage to your competitors.