By Charlene Weisler

Now, with more and more data coming from digital sources, mobile is emerging as a must have for marketers. Not only is it capturing individual behaviors, it also helps marketers map the consumer journey through location data, app usage and purchasing behavior. One would think that ad spend would follow but while there has been progress, the growth has been steady but slow, according to Joel Rubinson, President and Founder, Rubinson Partners, Inc. speaking at the recent MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) Impact conference.

Currently, ad spend on mobile is 40% of budgets, up from 34% in 2014 or $31.4 billion in total U.S. ad spend, representing 34% of total U.S. ad spend.  “Data is the new oil,” noted Rubinson, “But there is an oil embargo.”

This embargo is caused by a variety of challenges: Walled gardens of data are causing data gaps. Data is available on some platforms but not on others. User ID sharing has gotten tighter in a GDPR environment. MTA (Multi-touch Attribution) providers vary in their permission to access certain data. All of these missing variables require the need to ascribe and in doing so, “we may not get the comparisons right,” stated Rubinson, “and the whole predictive value of the model breaks down.”

To avoid the problems in attribution of marketing effects caused by publishers not offering data access, Rubinson suggests considering four possible workarounds:

• Go all in with a publisher
• Switch ad servers that don’t restrict IPs
• Use an MTA provider with approved tagging systems
• Create an uber-model combining characteristics of Mixed Marketing Models and MTA (with possible A/B testing)

It will take a while for the ad spend to truly represent the full promise and value of mobile but, through the work of such organizations as the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and their Marketing Attribution Think Tank (MATT), the world of marketing measurement and attribution  will gain better measurements, tools and predictive connections to the consumer journey.