• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 13, 2013

Both social and mobile have a strong following, but Siemer & Associates, an early-stage investor in advertising and media startups in Los Angeles, identifies several emerging related trends, subsets of the smartphone and the tablet markets.

Social media ad revenue should reach $4.2 billion, up 27% year-over-year, contributing to 10% of online ad revenue this year. Some 75% of marketers allocate funds to social media, with 64% planning to increase social budget in 2013.

Innovative ad formats around mobile, social, video and local are attracting marketers to increase online ad budgets. The app download market has become more sophisticated. Companies have begun to use YouTube to support more online campaigns, rising from 8.2% in 2009 to 41.9% in 2012.

The global mobile advertising market in 2012 was $6.8 billion, up 106.1% compared with $3.3 billion in 2011. Mobile ad spend is expected to make up 26% of overall Internet advertising spend by 2018, up from 9% in 2012, according to Siemer & Associates. The report suggests the mobile advertising market should exceed the size of the desktop advertising market by 2018.

Interestingly, mobile attribution has become a key issue. Platforms enabling tracking of app downloads continue to see significant investor interest. The ability to track the lifecycle of app use has begun to emerge as an important theme, according to the Siemer & Associates report.

Some other trends suggest online display ad or affiliate networks and agencies are viewed as commodities. Programmatic access and demand-side platforms remain interesting, though many see leapfrogging into mobile DSP and reverse engineering into online as being more cost-effective. Social media ad platforms also continue to gain interest, though those on an agency model with little tech see margin compression, according to the report.