Google believes 2011 really is the year of mobile advertising - Financial Times (blog)

The march of Google's Android operating system to the top of the smartphone world rankings has been one of the most eye-catching stories of the last year.

By contrast, mobile advertising has made somewhat slower progress over recent years.

Matt Brittin, Google's managing director of UK and Ireland, believes that is about to change.

"I would say that mobile [advertising] is really taking off, really reaching scale," Mr Brittin told the FT's Digital Media conference on Thursday. "Over the next three years or so, there will be huge adoption of mobile in markets where they have no [landline] internet access. I could go on and on about mobile because I think it's truly transformational."

Mr Brittin reeled off some impressive statistics to support his case: a billion people already access the mobile internet; Google is generating mobile revenues at a billion-dollar run rate; 125 years of Angry Birds, the popular mobile game, are played every day; and eBay sells three or four Ferraris every month through its mobile app.

"What's changed is it's here and it's at scale," he said.

But other members of the FT conference's panel on the future of advertising were still not convinced.

"I have a scepticism because it's interrupting consumers when people don't want to be interrupted," William Eccleshare, chief executive of Clear Channel International, the out-of-home advertising company, said of in-app advertising. "What I don't think mobile will do is create those brands. The Ferrari brand was not created by mobile advertising. But you can use it as part of a brand campaign."

Jeff Levick, president of global advertising and strategy at AOL, said that mobile advertising wouldn't really take off until mobile internet speeds match desktop computers – and even there, online advertising needs to make improvements.

"Brand building on the internet is still at a very early stage," Mr Levick said. "There has been an incredible lack of innovation in the display advertising business. The formats built 10 years ago have hardly changed. They were built by technologists in Silicon Valley, not by media people."

However, Mr Brittin was less bullish about the prospects for social-media advertising. In comments that will do little to dampen the rivalry between Google and Facebook, he said that it was difficult to find the "point at which a brand has the right to interact" with people on social networks.

"There are a lot of questions around privacy," he said. "We don't know anything about anybody. Facebook knows a hell of a lot about a lot of people." Getting permission to use that information is "a challenging thing not just for them but anybody monetising social media".

In this video, Mr Brittin talks about a digital divide in advertising, the year of m-commerce and Android taking on the iPad2.