Make your traditional campaign trackable and more engaging with mobile. Cielo Group's president and CEO explains.

Mobile applications that provide maximum take-up and the best ROI are those paired with traditional advertising. Effective mobile marketing activates otherwise static, non-interactive media -- such as print, radio and out-of-home -- while providing the added benefit of measurement of traditional media.

Mobile marketing is not about building mobile websites for consumers to browse. After all, few if any interactive advertising agencies increase their billings by getting consumers to browse top-level URLs on the web. Why, then, are agencies so concerned with "mobilizing" a client's website for consumers to view on their mobile phones?

On the web, the value of interactive marketing is the direct, measurable link between digital media and a call-to-action, promotional campaign or micro-site. The same holds true for mobile. Mobile marketing can do for traditional media what the web does for digital media, potentially with more powerful results. How? The mobile phone is the ultimate direct-response mechanism found in the pocket of every consumer. Unencumbered from PCs, mobile consumers respond to an ad's call-to-action immediately, at the moment of peak emotional interest.

In addition, while digital marketing budgets are rising, traditional media today remains the much larger slice of the U.S. advertising pie. Therefore, traditional media, with its ability to attract large numbers of "eyeballs," provides tremendous discovery and distribution of mobile applications -- the key to reaching a broad mobile audience.       

Mobile marketing is not about browsing. It's about activating traditional advertising with a direct, measurable and segmented link between traditional media and a mobile call-to-action.   

Author notes: Dean Macri is president and CEO of Cielo Group, Inc. Read full bio.