"Mobile as a category will prove to be far greater than just smartphones and tablets," reveals TRM&C director Tamara Roukaerts

“The quest to be innovative in mobile too often means brands racing to be first,” she said. “The rush to grab some trade press at launch sometimes overshadows the real innovation going on in mobile; brands that maybe don’t get the headlines are honing the use of these new technologies to deliver a meaningful mobile experience to the user – and to the business.”

According to Roukaerts mobile spend is “completely out of whack” with the time we spend on these devices and though signs show that spend is catching up she believes the initial “lag” was due to the fact that “traditional ad models and metrics just don’t work for mobile”.

She explains: “Some 50 per cent of clicks on mobile advertising are accidental and yet a lot of brands still use these erroneous clicks to justify ad spend. Brands need to better understand the multichannel customer journey and how mobile supports in-store and online purchasing or they’ll continue to invest in the wrong areas.”

Something set to disrupt the world of mobile marketing in the near future is the influx of new devices such as Google Glass and other wearable teach, which leads Roukaerts to draw on the principle “Zuck’s Law’ which suggests the amount of content shared doubles each year. “A new wave of mobile devices will enable this growth to continue and even accelerate it. Fuelled by the continuing increase in mobile processing power and the decreasing cost of mobile components, mobile as a category will prove to be far greater than just smartphones and tablets. Expect connected FMCG products, smart homes, interactive clothing, wearable devices and augmented reality eyewear to change the mobile paradigm,” she said.

However, Roukaerts believes further disruption in the mobile space will come not only from new devices but from the “kinds of content we create and consume,” predicting that wearable tech and eyewear like Google Glass will cause a “shift towards content with a first person, real time perspective”.

As the former head of marketing for augmented reality (AR) platform Aurasma Roukaerts also shared her insights into the world of AR with The Drum advising that though the space grew at an “astonishing rate” between 2010 and 2012 mobile devices are the “biggest barrier to the truly mainstream adoption of AR.”

She furthered: “On average, we look at our smartphones more than 100 times a day. Think about the ergonomics of that for a moment. Clearly as users we want a more immersive digital experience, but the mobile form factor – small screen, hand held – simply can’t deliver on that.

“The promise of a fully augmented world – where viewing augmented content is as common as visiting a website – is tremendous but we’ll need to adopt new forms of mobile devices like AR glasses before we see it.”

Of the advice she’ll give on the day itself, Roukaerts said: “The big challenge for business today isn’t the volume of new tech – the bigger challenge is the incredible volume of data businesses now have to make sense of…tools that help business automatically distill that data into actionable insights are going to become critically important.”

If you want to hear what Roukaerts and the rest of our Mobile MashUp panel have to say on the future of mobile then join The Drum for Disruption Day on Wednesday 4 November at SapientNitro, London. Roukaerts is one of a number of speakers including Steve Edwards, executive director and head of beyond at Manning Gottlieb OMD, Tim Burrell-Saward, co-founder of East London Kinetics, and DigitasLBi executive creative director Simon Gill. More information and ticket booking can be found on the 4 Minute Warning site.