It's almost four years since Ravi Kiran, the then CEO (South East & South Asia) for Starcom MediaVest told Shabir Momin, founder of mobile video company Zenga, that he would have a tough time trying to sell mobile advertising for the next 5-8 years: that building acceptance for the medium among marketers will take time. "Marketing people, whether we like it or not, don’t move as fast as we want them to. Ten years after creation of digital advertising as a medium, that medium is still struggling. It is still 3.5 percent of the Rs. 21-25,000 crores that this country spends on advertising. If you think that people will get evangelized in six months or one year, it is naive," Kiran had said at an ASSOCHAM conference in 2009, after Momin had asked him why marketers are unwilling to spend to advertise on a niche, paying-capable audience, that is more targeted. Zenga is still around, still doing video, and at the Mobile NXT conference yesterday, I asked Momin how things have changed, especially with the growth in mobile data consumption, and . "Ravi was right", Momin said, acknowledging that things have been tough the last four years, but also that "It's taken off now. (In the last four years) it was a stage where unless you had an extremely high value property, like a Cricket Match, it was difficult to go and sell ads. You couldn't sell ads for every day spots and banner ads. It was a trickle of revenue…
