Wireless Week has put online its cover story from a week or so ago, covering mobile advertising. It starts with a graphic detailing the predicted proportions in mobile ad spending by 2011 (from Strategy Analytics). The prediction is that 48 percent of mobile ad spending will web-based, 28 percent will be via search, 10 percent will be broadcast TV and the rest will squeeze in there. Strategy Analytics precits that advertisers will spend $1.4 billion on mobile media this year, rising to $14.4 billion by 2011, and eMarketer quotes much the same figures.

Kanishka Agarwal, vice president of mobile media for Telephia, said that the biggest issue fasing mobile advertising is that it is not a single advertising medium but combines print, TV, radio, the internet, gaming and music. Advertisers are used to dealing with each of these separately. He also said that mobile companies are selling tools and technology, when advertisers are looking for audiences. Other companies cited thing that mobile will be more about marketing than advertising (setting up a WAP site for a band vs sending promotional SMS)...“Phones are personal space, which makes them appealing for marketers but is dangerous ground for push advertising”.

Added value? There’s also support for the idea that mobile ads are inherently more valuable than internet ads. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has already said that mobile ads are twice as valuable as non-mobile ads because they’re more personal. Paul Palmieri, president and CEO of Millennial Media and former executive at Verizon Wireless, thinks that carriers might be justified charging rates 10 times higher than internet rates...“This is the most personal device that people own,” he says. “It is the most personal place you can reach a consumer. That really is something special and something premium and it ought to treated as such. The notion that the price is 10 times the Internet is well-deserved.” Whether that’s true or not is beyond my scope of knowledge—but if mobile ads are expensive there will be less of them, and they’ll be more targeted, which is good for consumers.