The continued growth of mobile marketing has all of us asking, just how high can it really go? We have seen two articles in the past week that suggest the sky may indeed be the limit as more people acquire smartphones and the efficacy of mobile ads continues to outpace all other mediums. Last week, Dennis Woodside, senior vice president of the Americas at Google, Mountain View, CA, talked about some of the ways that mobile phones are causing a cultural shift.  “We believe that mobile will create the largest technology market ever,” he said. “This market will dwarf the PC and all the PC industry has done."

This was followed by Matt Murphy, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, who manages the iFund dedicated to App based companies like Shazam. He sees a tremendous opportunity in mobile advertising as well but acknowledges the first couple of years have been rough due to "lumpy" buys, but the efficacy of the mobile advertising is quite compelling and as eyeballs go to mobile so will the ad dollars.

Eyeballs plus efficacy is the formula that tells us why mobile advertising will be bigger than the Internet. As Mr. Woodside said in NYC, the market will be huge as mobile sales are predicted to eclipse PC sales this year and will certainly be the platform of choice in developing countries. So as the numbers grow, what really makes the market size exceedingly big is how effective the ads can become as they become personal. Recently Apple announced its Campbell's iAD campaign had brand recall  5 times higher than TV and their intent to purchase was 4 times higher. Also while a TV spot lasted roughly 30 seconds, consumers spent just over a minute within the Campbell iAd. When you start to think about these kinds of brand recalls across a large number of eyeballs, you begin to realize why mobile advertising will be bigger than the Internet.