As I watch the impending mobile internet revolution and the mobile advertising that will follow it, I am constantly wondering whether linear thinking is holding us back. In the article in eMarketer titled The Big Picture on Small Screen Advertising, John du Pre Gaunt says “Historically, the gap between hope and reality for mobile video/television has been attributed to immature technology, Video content on mobile phones looked broken or washed out. Soundtracks often did not align with the moving images…”

In light of Apple “selling” 60 million apps for iPhones in the first 30 days, it looks to me that the gap is in imagination of the advertisers rather than a gap in either demand or technology. Is this a case of advertisers wanting to simply repurpose their TV ads on a small screen? If so, that would be tantamount to their having added talking-head images to radio ads when TV was a new technology — oh wait, that is what advertisers did for much of the first 10 years.

My view is that advertising needs to change to take advantage of this new medium. The numbers are big enough to justify creating new forms of advertising. Perhaps sponsor a free app, and do some mobile “product placement”. Perhaps leverage the power of social media as it goes more mobile (Facebook has a nice app for the iPhone, for example). Advertisers are losing time and opportunities if they wait for mobile phones to have the resolution, bandwidth, processing power, screen size, etc. of television.