Borrell Associates, Inc

I visited a newspaper manager last month and asked what he was doing in the mobile space.  “We’re doing what you recommended,” he said.”Nothing.”

Hmm.  I did say last year that mobile presented “a great opportunity for media companies to lose money.”  But I’m not sure that “nothing” is the appropriate strategy for a medium that will attract more local ad dollars than radio, yellow pages, direct mail or outdoor advertising within five years.

Truth be known, the newspaper manager was actually doing something.  He had launched an app and was delivering news over mobile devices.  But the company was devoting scant resources to sell the app or to work on anything else in the mobile space, like text coupons or location-based advertising.

So is that the appropriate strategy?  You’d think so if you’d seen what I’ve seen in the past two months.  Conference speakers get blank stares when they act like Chicken Little citing statistics about the growth of mobile advertising.  They get laughter and even applause when they do their Eeyore imitation bemoaning how overrated it all seems.

Case in point:  At a conference of major retailers in Chicago a few weeks ago, the founder and CEO of eMarketer took the stage and was far more energetic than his unresponsive audience.  His liveliness and jokes fell flat.  But he found a sweet spot when he started debunking the numbers for mobile advertising and social media.  He showed the wide range of forecasts being offered and commented, “I’m not sure where they’re getting these numbers.”  Chuckles and nodding.   When he showed research demonstrating how miniscule or overrated certain audiences were, the audience remained engaged.

Another case in point:  At a state broadcasting convention last month, the audience laughed and applauded when the president of Emmis Communications bashed social media and the phenomenon of people glued to Droids and iPods.

A final case in point:  Ten people emailed me an Advertising Age article headlined, “Forrester:  Why Most Marketers Should Forgo Foursquare.”  One of the comments on the Ad Age article observes:  “Wow – for once, Forrester isn’t riding the social media bandwagon and it gets taken to the woodshed by the commenters.”

The backlash for mobile marketing has begun.  I suspect it will intensify in the coming months as legacy media like TV, radio and newspapers start showing gains, as is typically the case when we climb out of  a deep recession.   Our forecasts at Borrell Associates show newspapers with annual revenue gains of 1.6% over the next five years, TV with gains of 3.6% and radio pretty much flat. The fact that newspapers and broadcast media aren’t dead is “news,” which means that all this stuff about new media killing old media must be hogwash.

So what does all this mean?   Timing is very important.   We are approaching the tail end of an extended period of hype for mobile marketing.  People are rushing in by the thousands with apps and features and software and all sorts of gimmicks, citing statistics (like Borrell Associates’) to gain credibility.  That bubble is about to burst, and mobile-bashing will become vogue, similar to what happened in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble burst.

That’s why we’ve pulled together a Local Mobile Advertising Conference next month in Dallas.  The agenda is devoid of people who have something to sell and includes only the key front-line strategists in the mobile space.  We’ve filtered out the hype and plan to get down to brass tacks.  What’s working, and what’s merely interesting but yields no results?

For media companies, successfully tackling the mobile space will depend not on rushing in with everything you’ve got, but knowing when to rush in with the appropriate effort.