It seems every year is declared the “year of mobile marketing.” The promise of mobile is certainly enticing: immediacy, engagement, flexibility and a reach beyond that of traditional online. After all, while computers get turned off at night, cellphones are constantly within arm’s reach of more than 70% of Canadians. You can’t find a media more intimate than one that lives in consumers’ pockets.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada, spending is slowly increasing—$2.7 million in 2007, up from $1.1 million the previous year—but this is miniscule compared to tried-and-true media such as television and print. The consensus among marketers is that mobile is still an experimental medium in Canada. In the current economic climate, experimentation is not in the budget. Marketers want guaranteed results, so “the year of mobile” remains ever in the future.

To facilitate a discussion on what’s holding mobile back, Marketing is “texting” industry thinkers about where the bottlenecks are, hoping to keep the conversation going.

Standard short message service (a.k.a. SMS or text messaging) accounts for the majority of mobile ads in Canada. Of the $2.7 million advertisers spent on mobile in 2007, 75% was spent on SMS, and it’s trending upward.

A major reason for SMS’s popularity is the common short code, a multi-digit number entered in lieu of a phone number (i.e. “Text CARS to 123456”). It’s quicker to dial, easier to remember and simple to include on advertising materials. According to the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA), there are about 400 short codes being used at any one time in Canada.

The codes are approved and assigned by the wireless providers who fund and steer the CWTA. The application process lasts between four and six weeks. For a platform that touts its immediacy, that might as well be in years.

“The existing four-to-six-week turnaround time does not align itself well to the marketing world,” says Derek Colfer, executive vice-president, mobile marketing, North America for Silverback Media. “Regardless of how often we preach to brands, agencies and media companies about planning well ahead of time, there is always a last-minute requirement for mobile that cannot be fulfilled due to the four-to-six-week process for short code approval, provisioning and testing. It’s really unfortunate and over time has had a negative impact on the growth of the mobile marketing sector in Canada.”

Marc Choma, spokesperson for the CWTA, says much of the responsibility of protecting consumers from spam lies with the CWTA. As a result, there are many obligations for short codes, and the association’s current process is designed to ensure absolute adherence.

Choma says the process is “quite structured to make it fair and equitable for everybody. The most important person in all of this is the consumer. They have to be protected. The rules in place right now do that.” However, he adds, “the industry is always looking at ways to improve the system.”

There are different kinds of common short codes. Some are advertiser- and program- specific, but one of the most useful to advertisers is the general use code. Aggregators acquire these from wireless carriers through the CWTA and act as landlord, subletting them to various clients on a project-by-project basis. With approval from the three national carriers, this means a shorter application period and more flexibility in adding SMS to an existing national marketing plan.

However Telus, which represents approximately 6.1 million of Canada’s 21.5 million mobile users, recently decided to stop supporting the format.

“In the interest of ensuring the best experience for Telus customers, and to allow us to prevent service interruptions due to unplanned or irresponsible short code activity, Telus has chosen to no longer support general use short codes,” said David Neale, senior vice-president of products and services, Telus consumer solutions, in an e-mail to Marketing. “Telus will evaluate programs on a case-by-case basis to ensure that our customers are not inconvenienced.”

With 6.1 million users now inaccessible, general use codes could become useless. Silverback Media’s Colfer says in his experience, he’s never worked with a brand or agency “that wants to only have a program accessible to a handful of carriers.” If national coverage is necessary, aggregators may be forced back into four-to-six-weeks applications for every campaign.

As director of mobile solutions at Sympatico, Brad Cressman not only helps advertisers serve ads to mobile sites, he often helps create the sites themselves. He works directly with advertisers, media agencies and creative shops, and sees firsthand where mistakes are made.

“People are already talking about ‘beyond the banner ad,’ ” Cressman says. “I always find that funny. Yes, we should be looking at innovation, but so few people have taken the time to do the [mobile] banner right. It’s like they’re on fast forward. It took us 10 years to get where we are now online. With mobile, it’s like we’re trying to take 10 years of learning and condense it into two... We’re still exploring and learning.”

This sentiment is echoed by Jonathan Dunn, a mobile marketing consultant who sat on IAB Canada’s Emerging Platforms council. “There’s a run-before-you-walk mentality,” Dunn says, and the iPhone is the perfect example. Developers are rushing to get their clients’ brands into the App Store, seen as the hottest place to be in mobile marketing. “You must remember that at the end of Q4 there were about half a million iPhones sold, but there are more than 20 million mobile customers out there.”

Dunn says agencies should invest in mobile expertise—someone to work on the account team who can make recommendations about the market and its users’ expectations. He loves The Weather Network’s mobile application, which has attracted many big-name advertisers, including Yahoo. But only a few of them, he says, know what to do once they’re there.

“They had one automotive advertiser that, when you clicked through, gave you a microsite with a logo across the top and some text that said, ‘Stay tuned for more information on this product.’ It wasn’t very good looking. It didn’t offer the ability to do a dealer search or get a product brochure. They’d gotten people to click through, but the opportunity wasn’t really exploited.”

A bad economy means good ROI is everything, but the mobile industry has yet to reach a consensus on what metrics work best. Because mobile phones don’t use tracking cookies the same way desktop computers do, website stats like unique visitors are hard to come by. Old standbys such as click-through rates on display ads are often used, but that’s a mere glimpse at how mobile consumers view marketing.

“We had a campaign for Lexus where you could build and price your own car model,” Cressman says. “If you can be on someone’s phone and they have enough interest to click through, watch a video, build a car on and then check a list of nearby dealer locations, that’s a good lead. If you looked at that based on click-through rate, you wouldn’t be seeing the whole picture.”

Paula Gignac, president of IAB Canada, says there is no shortage of metrics, but companies haven’t yet found the ones that define the terms of their own success, and won’t do so until they invest more. “The [ad] industry always tries to bring it down to one metric,” Gignac says. “That’s what the traditional [marketers] would like to do, but too bad for them. It’s never going to be just one.” She adds that it will take clients spending more on campaigns and matching that spending against sales before any marketer will truly know what works for them.

An industry body representing marketers and aggregators would help this along by creating a pool of data from which best marketing practices could be extracted. The CWTA speaks with great authority as an industry body, but its board is comprised almost entirely of wireless providers. Most of its research focuses on tracking mobile penetration and consumer usage. A marketer association could delve into how best reach those consumers with relevant messages.

IAB Canada recently released its first survey of Canadian mobile advertising revenue and is about to release a mobile “state of the nation document,” proving it’s committed to researching the space. Its Emerging Platforms council already serves as a nexus for industry stakeholders and could easily spawn a mobile marketing organization. Gignac doubts the IAB would ever become a formal mobile association, but says it already lobbies for the platform, seeking to expand its use among advertisers.

Whether it’s the IAB or a new body that leads the way, if the pool of publicly available information doesn’t deepen, mobile marketing will wallow in the shallows, guessing at ROI and never earning a seat at the big table.

Will Canada ever become a leader in mobile marketing? Will the “year of mobile” ever arrive?