According to AdMob, iPhone and Android users now account for 82% of US mobile web traffic. Clearly, the two platforms have radically changed the marketplace. The combination of Apple and Google has created a tipping point for mobile marketing.

Here are five things you need to know about how iPhone & Android have changed mobile advertising and why marketers need to make the call now.

1. Your Customers are on More Than One Carrier

The iPhone’s web browsing and application market created the inflection point for massive mobile consumer adoption in the US. However, the iPhone’s superior handset experience is handcuffed to AT&T Wireless. Many mobile customers are tied to corporate accounts, employee carrier discounts, and contractual obligations that prevent them from switching. In addition, AT&T’s official wireless broadband (3G) coverage map excludes 25% of the U.S. population and reliability has been questioned by users in top metros. It was easy to make this point at a recent iMedia mobile class we led for top ad agencies. Most of the iPhone-shakin’ audience wanted to know about iPhone mobile ad campaigns for Starbucks and NBC, but had no 3G coverage.

Until the iPhone is offered by other carriers, an iPhone-only mobile initiative may leave many potential customers in the dark. A complete mobile marketing strategy must consider reaching Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile audiences. Of all the smartphone options, Android is showing the greatest momentum with a number of analysts predicting the Motorola Droid will hit 1 million devices shipped by the end of 2009.

A 2010 Prediction For Android:

At WhitePages, we are forecasting that there will be 10 million Android devices shipped in the US by the end of 2010. We arrived at this number by taking the 33.5 million customer base of T-Mobile (the first US carrier to offer Android) and dividing it by an estimate of 2 million Android devices shipped by that carrier to arrive at a 6% penetration rate. We then applied this penetration rate to the much larger and higher-spending customer bases of Sprint and Verizon who just started offering Android devices. The predicted result is 10.1 million Android devices in the US by the end of 2010.

2. Marketing Begins and Ends With Numbers

The mobile marketing platform has lagged behind the web in its ability to provide critical metrics and control for advertisers to measure and optimize ad campaigns. On the web, many ad campaigns drop cookies to manage consumer reach and frequency. This cross-platform capability was not possible on mobile until recently. Companies like Ringleader Digital provide mobile ad-serving platforms with real-time capabilities to track and target users and meet advertiser needs around frequency-capping and acquisition tracking.

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