Mobile media is playing a significant role this year in the holiday buying cycle.  According to the IBM Smarter Commerce benchmark of online retail activity, mobile platforms were responsible for 14.3% of all online shopping traffic on Black Friday, more than doubling the 5.6% of traffic IBM recorded last year. Perhaps even more impressive, sales from mobile devices reached 9.8% of digital retail transactions, tripling the 3.2% of last year. That’s 300% growth, friends!

“There’s an app for that” has become part of the cultural mainstream. In fact, there are apps for banking, learning Chinese, finding Chinese food, playing Scrabble, and a host of other activities. In fact, people are downloading apps more than ever.

The share of adult cellphone owners who have downloaded an app nearly doubled in the past two years –from 22% in September 2009 to 38% in August 2011 – according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Still, only about half of U.S. adults with cellphones have apps on their phones, and only about one in four cellphone owners age 18 or older has ever paid for an app, whose prices typically start at about one dollar.

Key Findings:

• The most commonly downloaded apps are those that provide regular updates about everyday information such as news, weather, sports, or stocks (74% of downloaders)

• Also popular are apps that help people communicate with friends and family (67%) and apps that help the user learn about something in which they are interested (64%)

Interestingly, the survey found only two-thirds of people with apps on their phones ever use them.

“While mobile apps are a fairly new approach to accessing online content, the main functions they fill for users are the same we’ve seen with previous technologies—namely, information gathering and communication,” notes Kristen Purcell, author of the report and Associate Director for Research at Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. “It’s too early to know if, by providing instant, direct connections to information, apps are a game changer. While they are a significant change from using search engines and web browsers, the basic functions apps fill are not revolutionary.”

These findings are from a survey conducted from July 25-August 26 among 2,260 adults ages 18 and over, including surveys in English and Spanish and on both land-line and cellphones. The margin of error for the total sample is plus or minus 2 percentage points.

For 2010 Mobile marketing is posed to make great strides in both brand acceptance and consumer interaction.

Unica recently surveyed ad agencies and brands about their current and future use of mobile marketing. They found that 33% of brands currently use mobile tactics to reach/communicate with their consumers. Another 24% said their company plans to use mobile tactics within the next 12 months, and 13% said they will use mobile tactics in more than the next 12 months.
Only 20% said their company has no plans to use mobile marketing tactics, and another 10% don’t know. This means the combined percentage of respondents whose companies definitely or possibly will not use mobile marketing tactics (30%) is smaller than the percentages of respondents who currently use them (33%) or will use them within the next 12 months or longer (a combined 57%).

Broken down by region, more European respondents said their company currently uses mobile marketing tactics (37%) than North American respondents (29%), reflecting Europe’s more advanced and entrenched mobile infrastructure.

More than 100% growth in adoption

Looking at specific mobile marketing channel usage and adoption rates, the use of the three major mobile marketing channels of SMS/MMS/WAP, mobile websites, and mobile applications should all roughly double in the next 12 months.

Mobile Devices Becoming More Popular, More Affordable

The popularity of mobile marketing tactics has been rapidly growing as the popularity of smartphones, 3G devices and other advanced mobile applications surged in the US during 2009, according to comScore mobiLens data.

Between December 2008 and December 2009, the percentage of US mobile phone subscribers with unlimited data plans increased from 16% to 21%. During the same period, smartphone ownership increased from 11% to 17%, while 3G phone ownership increased from 32% to 43% among smartphone users.

The clear take-away here is with an increase of bandwidth and with advanced mobile devices becoming more affordable, the stage is set for brands to begin to experiment, test and deploy mobile efforts in 2010.