You Paid How Much for That Mobile Platform?

In a controversial set of reports and posts last week, a research attached to the 3G trade association, GSMA pegged the value of the mobile media platform at $250 billion by 2010. Blogger fuses blew up everywhere, but it was unclear whether the initial analyst from STL was misunderstood. Whatever. It underscores the point that mobile marketing spend is projected all over the map, as mocoNews’ Tricia Duryea rightly points out. Why hasn’t mobile learned the lesson of the early Web and enforced a little self discipline? When was the last time a journalist reporting on these ridiculous estimates of mobile media spending asked the simple question, “how do you figure?” Are these research companies actually speaking directly with mobile marketing companies about the level of revenues they are seeing or the actual spending patterns among media buyers? Are they presuming hockey stick pick up of mobile media that in fact is not occurring in the U.S. market? Are they anticipating budget shifts to mobile that have no precedent…ever? What we need is a central organization like the Mobile Marketing Association to perform the same quasi-official market sizing duties the IAB currently performs. The MMA should leverage its connections throughout the content and marketing value chain to issue reasonable estimates of current spending so that projections have some sane starting point.