At the recent MMA New York forum, a two day conference focused on highlighting market trends and innovations in the growing mobile space, a shift was apparent. Marketers are no longer trying to simply learn about mobile usage, to understand how consumers utilize multi-screen viewing. Mobile has already made the move to be a priority for the majority of companies’ long-term marketing goals. However, much interest still remains around better understanding the impact of mobile marketing and how it fits alongside other media in the overall mix.

It’s no surprise that understanding mobile’s impact has its hurdles: lack of cookie or tracking data, increased privacy concerns, limitations with mobile ad servers, etc. And while these wrinkles persist, AT&T, the MMA, and Marketing Evolution recently conducted some groundbreaking research delivering real data on mobile's impact in the marketing mix. Marketing Evolution examined how marketers can optimize cross media resulting in a higher ROI without increasing your campaign budget.

For this study, Marketing Evolution analyzed mobile advertising for the release of AT&T’s Moto X smartphone. AT&T’s primary objective for the advertising is increasing awareness. Through the prism of Marketing Evolution’s Impact Based Planning (IBP) software, we calculated the reach, frequency, and impact on awareness of Moto X phones across all the media in the mix. We sought to understand how cost-effective mobile advertising is and just how efficient AT&T’s overall marketing mix was. Through analysis of representative set of surveys using control and exposed respondents, we found the impact of each media in the media mix. We found that mobile had strong impact on awareness, and was under-spent relative to other media. Increasing spend on Mobile would yield meaningful incremental impact. For more information, make sure to register for this month’s webinar where Rex will re-visit these newly released findings, and show how the IBP media planning software can be used by a variety of marketers across a range of industries to forecast the likely impact of mobile, and conduct side-by-side of media plans with and without mobile in the media mix.