Author: Dan Gendro

While organizations are increasingly likely to have a smartphone ad strategy, levels still haven’t reached expectations.

According to a report that has now been issued by Oracle Marketing Cloud and Econsultancy, businesses are now more likely than ever before to have some type of strategy in place for the integration of mobile marketing into their overall promotions and advertising campaigns.

The report showed that while the acknowledgement of importance is there, the integration remains small.

The publication, entitled the “Cross-Channel Marketing Report 2014” showed that marketers and brands are continuing their transition from traditional channels toward digital and mobile marketing. However, in the United Kingdom, while it is clear that companies find that there is considerable importance in using those channels, there hasn’t been a tremendous focus made in terms of actually working them into a campaign.

It is believed that this will soon begin to pick up, as many companies are making their first mobile marketing moves in 2014.

The report showed that 20 percent of companies are now using mobile notifications and push alerts and that these, combined with messaging, mobile apps, and email are viewed by marketers as the areas in which they will best be able to achieve customer retention.

This aligned with a report that was published by the 2014 Internet Trends Report which focused on the market in the United States. This latest report used the same sources as the American one, only using data from the United Kingdom, instead. The U.K. figures showed that while mobile represents 20 percent of a consumer’s total time spent with media, it also represents only 7 percent of total ad spend.

When applied to an actual monetary value, this represents a gap that is worth an estimated £1.9 billion. The shortfall has been attributed to a greater mobile optimization and advertising activity market, in addition to actual ad spending. That said, this still represents a sizeable gap between the actual time spent by consumers and the amount of money spent by marketers.

Equally, though, among the brands and marketers surveyed, 75 percent said that they had some type of mobile marketing integration strategy in place for their campaigns, which represents a year over year growth of 16 percent.

The approval has given the smartphone manufacturer’s efforts to recover its glory a boost in the right direction.

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) will allow customers to use Blackberry’s mobile security software to manage devices on the agency’s network that are powered by iOS and Android.

BlackBerry is positioning itself as the mobile market leader in security technology for big businesses and governments.

Recently, Blackberry Limited acquired Secusmart GmbH, a German mobile security company, to enhance its security offerings for enterprise patrons. This led to BlackBerry CEO John Chen telling employees that it is now time to focus on boosting sales from the new device and software launch, which was a positive and welcome change from company layoffs.

The company, which is based out of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, announced that customers of the U.S. DoD that are BlackBerry users and/or who use smartphones or tablets that run iOS or Android and are linked to the BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) 10 technology, are now authorized to send each other sensitive information.

BlackBerry stated that “The (Security Technical Implementation Guide) approval provides additional confidence for government agencies considering a more open mobile environment with a selection of devices and operating systems.”

Blackberry has high hopes that its next generation mobile security software, BES12, will give it a leg up over the competition.

Businesses and governments utilize supposed mobile device management software to manage smartphone security and software that enterprise customers oversee or issue for their staff. BlackBerry has several competitors in his field, such as Citrix Systems Inc. Airwatch (owned by VMware Inc.), International Business Machines Corp., and MobileIron Inc.

BES12 will be launched by BlackBerry near the end of 2014 and the company is betting on this mobile management software to give them the edge they need over their competition. So far, according to Chen, the feedback the company has received from testers of the technology has been positive. Chen stated that six customers in North America and Europe were testing the tech and that an additional six would begin testing in July.

According to a spokeswoman from the company, the DoD’s approval for BES10 does not include BES12. Each version of the mobile security technology is approved separately.