Local Mobile Advertising Will Hit $3.1 Billion In Five Years

Local mobile advertising is growing, and fast, so maybe that’s where you want to be in the coming months? Newspaper groups like Belo, Hearst, MediaNews Group and Cox think so— they’ve all inked deals with a company called Verve Wireless, which publishes and monetizes mobile content. Verve now “mobilizes” 450 media properties and covers the top 200 DMAs in the U.S.

Mobile advertising as a whole is predicted to jump 26 percent this year while overall marketing spending drops 7 percent. And Microsoft is also getting in on the mobile search party. Corporate VP Scott Howe believes that mobile advertising will grab 5-10 percent of total media spending in the next five years, which partially explains why Microsoft’s just-revamped Bing search engine is aimed partially at capturing mobile search users (it takes fewer clicks to search).

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting this Thursday, February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Michael Brito (Edelman Digital), and Tim Devane (bitly). Register now.