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NEW YORK, NY – Are mobile marketers moving ahead or merely spinning their wheels?

”2007 was not ‘the year of mobile marketing’ that it was advertised to be,” says John du Pre Gauntt, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the new report, Mobile Advertising: After the Growing Pains. “And 2008 won’t be either.”

Even though mobile marketing and advertising didn’t break into the mainstream during 2007, with events such as the iPhone launch and other under-the-hood improvements, mobile marketers did take strides to move past the experimental stage of development.

In fact, eMarketer forecasts that worldwide mobile advertising spending will reach $19 billion by 2012.

”The vast majority of the spending will be based on text-messaging campaigns,” says Mr. Gauntt, “with mobile display advertising and mobile search constituting the rest of the main market.”

However, compared to other interactive platforms, mobile still remains extremely small in overall spending.

”A basic problem facing mobile marketing and advertising is that, while the business proposition cuts across many industries—telecom, technology, media, marketing, retail—it affects the economics of each industry differently,” says Mr. Gauntt.

But that’s not all.

“A clear bone of contention involves customer information,” says Mr. Gauntt. “All parties agree that better targeting will happen, given the personal nature of mobile phones, but the question of how to use customer information to improve ad targeting while respecting privacy remains elusive.”

Assuming the sensitive issues surrounding customer data and location can be solved, there is still the matter of the true elephant in the room: the possibility of advertising revenue subsidizing basic mobile services such as voice, text or data.

Telephia, now a part of Nielsen Mobile, recently reported the range of direct monthly charges levied on US mobile customers for different applications on top of mobile data access.

”It’s not lost on mobile users that they still pay for almost everything on mobile,” says Mr. Gauntt.

Before mobile marketing can truly get moving, many obstacles will have to be overcome.