The Asia-Pacific region is set to emerge as the world leader in mobile marketing and advertising, as the increasing growth will boost the total spent in the region to $7.7 billion by 2011.

This can be compared to the total global spent, which is a little more than $16 billion, reveals a report from ABI Research.

Mobile marketing and advertising are widely adopted in the Asia- Pacific region, particularly in the broadband-enabled countries, including Japan and South Korea, where

SMS text messaging, the downloading of ad-supported games and applications, and the mobile web are adopted widely and quickly by consumers.

Countries falling in this region are seen having more awareness in terms of how to use these services and rapidly built them into their lifestyles.

Referring to mobile advertising, ABI Research senior analyst Jeff Orr said that this form of advertising enjoys a growing demand and such advertising differ from conventional forms in regard to the need of new ways of thinking about ad campaigns.

“Mobile advertising is intrinsically more targeted than ads in conventional media or even online. It also offers much greater potential for interactivity: it’s really a ‘conversation’ with your customer, one that can allow the consumer to take direct purchasing action. And it offers extremely accurate measurement of campaign results,” said Orr.

Spending on mobile marketing and advertising in 2009 worldwide is seen to be almost flat as compared to 2008 if not growing by a slight.

“That’s very encouraging compared to the numbers for advertising in other media. It’s less money per campaign, spent more intelligently, with greater benefit per dollar,” said Orr.

However, mobile advertising too is not immune to the recession. If an advertiser or brand owner had mobile in their experimental budget, chances are it has been cut.

But if mobile was already a more significant and established part of the marketing mix, spending has been maintained or even increased for 2009.