What a difference a year makes. eMarketer’s September 2009 mobile advertising report carried the optimistic subtitle “Change Is in the Air.” Well, it’s safe to say that in 2010, change happened, and mobile advertising ramped up at a quicker pace than predicted.

eMarketer now predicts $743.1 million in total mobile ad spending in 2010, a more than 25% increase over last year’s forecast. Our projections are up on the order of 25% to 35% per year through 2014.

In my new report, “Mobile Advertising and Marketing: Past the Tipping Point” (full version available here to Total Access clients only), I explore in detail the key factors behind this increase in spending. They include:

• Major acquisitions of mobile ad networks by Google and Apple
• Rising adoption of super-capable multimedia smartphones
• The launch of the iPad and the rapid revitalization of the tablet market

Cautious optimism about economic recovery can take some credit as well, but it is really the injection of a new dynamic in the mobile space that is prompting marketers to overcome their reluctance to embrace mobile as a channel to connect with consumers.

Much of this new dynamic is attributable to the high-profile (and high-dollar) acquisitions by Google and Apple and the ways both companies have sought to redefine the mobile device and advertising markets. Google’s promotion of Android has made it a powerful alternative to Apple’s popular iOS platform. And Apple, in turn, has countered with the launch of the iPad, a new iPhone and iAd, the company’s own advertising platform exclusive to Apple devices.

As I noted in a previous blog post, iAd has generated its share of controversy. But in a recent address at the iMedia Breakthrough Summit, I shared the results of nearly a dozen interviews I conducted with industry executives over the past two months. Everyone I spoke with, including some of Apple’s competitors, agreed that iAd has been hugely beneficial to mobile advertising.

Google’s acquisition of AdMob is no less significant, because it will help bring scale to mobile advertising. In the report I write:

Part of what has made Google so successful is the degree to which it has helped demystify and simplify the media buying process. If it can achieve a comparable result with mobile and provide an equivalent level of tools, reporting and accountability, the effect will be significant in both the number of advertisers it will be able to attract to mobile and the amount they spend.

The importance of scale should not be underestimated; it is vital for the long-term viability of mobile advertising.

There is more detail in the report, but the bottom line is this: with consumers spending an ever-increasing amount of time in front of their mobile devices, marketers can scarcely afford not to pay closer attention to mobile. To the contrary, brands need mobile more than ever to stay relevant. And with more capable devices, faster carrier networks, ubiquitous wireless broadband and the availability of richer ad units, marketers have more possibilities than ever to deliver immersive experiences.

This shift is already well under way on the desktop. Starting with the rich media ads proliferating today, the next five years will see more interactivity, higher-powered creative and yes, perhaps even more emotion in mobile advertising.

It’s certainly a big piece. Barcode scanners are not widely adopted in the US – yet – but consumer awareness is rising fast. The popularity of the RedLaser iPhone app, which topped five million downloads earlier this month, is a sign of what’s to come. To keep pace, Amazon just added scanning capability to its iPhone app.

As my colleague Jeff Grau noted in his June 2010 “Mobile Shopping from In-Store: A Potential Game Changer” report (full version available here to Total Access clients only), shoppers who scan barcodes to compare prices, locate product reviews and create wish lists are still in the minority. Not surprisingly, Generation Y shoppers, who were raised on the internet and view their mobile devices as an extension of themselves, are the early adopters. They are the ones pushing retailers to offer a more interactive in-store shopping experience.

But clearly, they aren’t the only ones. According to the September 2010 “ScanLife Mobile Barcode Trend Report” from Scanbuy, a provider of mobile barcode solutions, traffic generated from scans has climbed 700% since January 2010.

Price comparison is a key driver of this increase in scanning. In a survey conducted by BuzzBack Market Research for NCR, 43% of consumers in nine major markets, including the US, said they view barcode scanning to find the best prices as an important way to give them more control over the shopping experience.

With its competitive pricing, efficient service and extremely well optimized product catalog, Amazon benefits directly from the steep increase in barcode scanning activity. Adding the capability to its own app only increases Amazon’s competitive advantage, not just over brick-and-mortar retailers but other online merchants as well. As ReadWriteWeb put it succinctly:

With Amazon’s new barcode-scanning technology, it’s not so much of a global price comparison engine but one that answers the simple question: “I wonder if this is cheaper on Amazon?”

Integrating the scanning capability is a smart move for Amazon because it removes friction from the buying process and enables interested consumers to pull the trigger on a purchase right from within the app.

The takeaway: barcode scanning is slowly transforming the in-store shopping experience. But if Amazon has anything to say about it, barcode scanning will make the shopping and buying experience more mobile than ever.

Millennials can be a tricky target for marketers. Despite the fact that, according to eMarketer, more than 82% of US internet users 18 to 34 use social networks at least monthly (and that percentage is likely near 100% in target markets), about 84% of millennials say they don’t notice ads on social sites, according to the Lubin School of Business.

So what are the best ways for marketers to penetrate the seemingly impenetrable millennial market? According to a recent survey by the Pivot Conference, the answer may be cause marketing. About two-thirds of the respondents to the Pivot poll agreed that green and socially conscious motivations were one of the top factors that differentiated millennials from other demographic and psychographic groups.

That perception falls in line with research the eMarketer Daily reported on from agency Cone. While interest in cause-related marketing grew among the general population between 2008 and 2010, social and environmental causes had a significantly greater influence on the purchase decisions of millennials than other generations. If marketers are looking for 18- to 34-year-olds’ “susceptibility” to branding, social and green issues are a good place to start, with 85% saying they would switch brands because of such marketing and 73% saying they would try a new brand. According to Cone, moms are also a prime target of cause-related campaigns.

Asked about what kinds of cause marketing brands could provide that would entice them, millennials were most interested in ways they could learn about issues (86%), buy products where a portion of the sale supports a good cause (85%) or donate money to a nonprofit identified by a brand (84%). With that in mind, brands that show a deep commitment to their chosen cause and facilitate learning and changes in a community are more likely than others to succeed. Do you agree?

Thanks in large part to the success of iPad, 2010 is shaping up to be the year of the tablet. Apple succeeded in resurrecting a moribund form factor and endowing it with new life and a broader appeal. Much of that appeal stems from familiarity: the iPad is not only immediately recognizable to the millions of iPhone and iPod users but also draws from the same pool of content (music, games, video, apps) on which owners of other Apple products have come to rely.

The next 12 months will see a raft of tablet introductions as other manufacturers rush to play catch-up with Apple and capture a piece of this emerging market. For the most part, the tablet market is likely to emerge as another battleground in the increasingly fierce mobile OS war between Apple and Google. As in the smartphone market, Apple has some advantage because the iTunes and App stores have a larger pool of content than Android Market, but the increasing scale of Android devices is helping giving the Android content marketplace greater appeal.

A wild card in the tablet market is BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM). Today it introduced the PlayBook, a tablet running on a new OS derived from QNX, the software company RIM acquired from Harman International in April (at the time, the acquisition seemed to herald a push into the automotive telematics space).

As with its smartphones, RIM faces unique challenges as it prepares to enter the tablet market. Although BlackBerry holds the largest share of the US smartphone market, and its devices often rank among the top 10 best-selling phones (meaning that many consumers are buying them), RIM is nonetheless associated with the enterprise. As such, it faces the perennial issue of how to balance the needs of its core business customers with the differing demands of its consumer audience.

In a recent blog post, AMD’s Pat Moorhead shared his “wish list” of features he’d like to see in a RIM tablet. It includes access to enterprise applications (network and SharePoint access, printing to networked computers, use of corporate web apps such as budgeting and expenses  and BlackBerry apps such as e-mail, calendar and address book), video conferencing and peer-to-peer resource sharing with BlackBerry smartphones for things like phone calls and wireless tethering.

Some of these features would undoubtedly serve consumer tablet use as well, but would also edge the tablet closer to a computing device rather than a portable entertainment and media consumption device. There’s nothing wrong with that approach per se. In fact, unlike the smartphone market, where device size and specs are fairly well established, tablet manufacturers have more latitude to experiment with different screen sizes and device features. Some tablets will be more smartphone-like while others will be more computer-like.

But satisfying both sets of demands equally well is difficult – a lesson RIM has learned with the latest BlackBerry smartphones.  A new and untested OS and RIM’s somewhat spotty history with touchscreen user interfaces represent additional hurdles. Appealing entertainment features combined with a robust enterprise tool set could make for a crossover hit, but there are still many question marks.

UPDATE: PlayBook is the official name of RIM’s new tablet. Full specs available here. As expected, the PlayBook attempts to satisfy both constituencies, but will enterprise customers be tempted to “Play” along or throw out the PlayBook? The feature set says yes, but the name says no.

The ad:tech London conference rang several changes in 2010. For one thing, conference sessions were located in the same hall as exhibitors’ stalls and the seminars delivered by industry experts. This made for a buzzy gathering and more concentrated networking.

In another departure, a representative of the print publishing fraternity struck a positively optimistic note. According to Martin Morgan, CEO of the Daily Mail and General Trust, the DMGT now derives 30% of its revenue from digital. With 44 million unique users each month, the Daily Mail earns significant sums from advertisers. As a result, Morgan confidently predicted that the Mail site will remain free to access—and should pick up additional readers from news providers that move behind pay-walls.

But the big stories were social and mobile. Since last year, social media services have consolidated their position in the limelight. Shiva Rajaraman, product manager at Twitter, kicked off the two-day program, sharing some statistics (the site attracted an average 90 million tweets per day in September 2010) and news that the company will soon allow advertisers to target Twitter users on the basis of who they follow and what they are looking for. 

Next up was Colm Long, Facebook’s director of online operations, EMEA. Impressive stats here, too: According to Long, the site now operates in 70 languages (translated within hours by about 300,000 volunteers around the world), and 150 million people access Facebook via mobile apps. In the UK alone, there were almost 28 million users at the start of September 2010—more than 45% of the population, and about 55% of web users. Over 60% of UK Facebook users log in daily, and 52% are female.

Other speakers reporting from the front line of the social frontier included Nicole Vanderbilt, CEO of furniture and interiors site mydeco, which currently boasts 1.2 million unique visitors per month. Advanced software enables users to plan rooms, decorate and furnish them virtually, and offers various sharing options too. Site visitors can comment on the room plans and reviews of other users. Mydeco also benefits from the 1 million monthly click-throughs to retail partners whose goods are shown on the site.

Meanwhile, luxury brand owner LVMH is pioneering the concept of “open luxury.” The key, said Kamel Ouadi, EVP, Digital for Louis Vuitton, was to recognize the complex emotions associated with luxury in consumers’ minds, and recreate those by digital means. LVMH has tapped top-flight writers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, designers, actors and fashion figures to create exclusive high-end content for a new website, Nowness.  Launched in February 2010, the site aims to become “the essential reference point for luxury global lifestyle” and to disprove the notion that luxury and exclusivity sit oddly with social media. One new film or audio production from the stable of creative talents is uploaded each day. The site, said Ouadi, incorporates software “capable of assessing our users’ interests and tailoring our recommendations for stories to reflect their preferences as they browse the content archive.” The site now claims 200,000 unique monthly visitors.

Dell too is exploring the intersection of intimacy and scale, according to Manish Mehta, Vice President, Global Online for the computer giant. The goal, he said, was to take social media “beyond campaigns,” and ensure that Dell established an online “voice” that served as both foundation and expression of the brand. The company is also taking steps in social commerce—one project aims to create a tag cloud for aggregated product reviews, and post the results on Facebook.

Mobile business has also leapt ahead since 2009. Thankfully, the industry is well past the point of asking whether this is “the year of mobile”; recent statistics and projections speak for themselves. According to Ian Carrington, Google’s director of mobile advertising for the EMEA region, mobile search is growing at 400% per year, and spending in this area is set to climb from £500 million ($700 million) in 2009 to £2.8 billion ($3.9 billion) by 2013. Of course, not every proposition succeeds in this highly competitive marketplace. Carrington cited evidence that 90% of mobile apps are deleted within 30 days of download, as their novelty or usefulness wanes. But consumers’ willingness to engage and transact via mobile is good news for many retailers. Overall, said Carrington, Google has found conversions to purchase 43% higher on the mobile platform than on PCs.

Life isn’t always easy for exponents of the new mobile way of life, however—to judge by the recent adventures of Alexandre Mars, CEO of mobile communications agency PhoneValley and Head of Mobile for Publicis Groupe. Mars appeared on the ad:tech stage walking gingerly, and sporting a black eye. Apologizing for his appearance, he told the story: A few days earlier, he was attending meetings in New York City, where stocks of the iPhone 4 were low or nonexistent. Walking alone one evening, he was attacked and beaten by a gang of young people eager to get their hands on the coveted handset. The bruises, said Mars, were taking a while to heal. But he did manage to hang on to his iPhone.