Advertising budgets for mobile channels are expected to exhibit strong growth over the next five years, reaching $5.7bn by 2014.

A new report from Juniper Research has found that constraints on budgets, imposed in the wake of the global economic downturn, had resulted in an increasing migration of adspend from above-the-line to below-the-line channels: the need for engagement with the consumer, and a quantifiable ROI, meant that mobile was increasingly being perceived as a key medium through which to pursue this strategy.

However, the study stressed that, while this was encouraging, the level of growth had to be put into context – that mobile advertising still remained very much a nascent medium, and even by 2014 it would only account for up to 1.5 per cent of total global adspend.   

The report noted that, while a number of major brands had made relatively large investments in the mobile platform, advertisers have yet to be fully convinced that mobile has sufficient reach to warrant substantive adspend.