NEW YORK: Mobile marketing budgets have surged almost 150% since 2011 and one-in-five US marketers expect to increase their mobile spend by more than 50% over the next couple of years, a new survey has found.

The 2013 "Marketer Perspectives on Mobile Advertising" survey from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the non-profit trade association, polled 300 US organisations that use mobile advertising and updates results from 2011.

On top of its key finding that mobile budgets rose 142% over the past two years, the IAB also found 74% of brand marketers expect their mobile spend to increase in the next two years, including 19% who expect budgets to increase by more than 50%.

The number of those managing annual mobile budgets of more than $300k has also more than quadrupled from 7% in 2011 to 32% this year.

"These findings reaffirm that publishers need to make mobile a top priority in order to take advantage of strong brand marketer demand," said Anna Bager, vice president of IAB's Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence.

She added that the IAB would need to continue certain initiatives, such as its HTML5 guidance for digital advertising, after this issue was ranked as one of the top developments since 2011 along with native advertising and responsive design.

Respondents also indicated that considerable progress has been made to address a series of key challenges they regarded as pressing in 2011.

The number viewing privacy as a very important challenge has almost halved to 22%, suggesting confidence in the Digital Advertising Alliance's mobile privacy guidelines.

Just 23% now regard device/operating system fragmentation to be a major concern, compared with 39% in 2011.

Elsewhere, the number citing standard mobile metrics as a concern has fallen from 31% to 13% this year.

The findings were released at the IAB's MIXX conference in New York, where the organisation also hosted the ninth annual IAB MIXX Awards to celebrate the best digital advertising pioneers and brands.

Coca-Cola and Leo Burnett (Sydney and Chicago) won the coveted Best-in-Show award for their "Small World Machines" campaign, which sought to unite consumers in Pakistan and India by linking them digitally over the three-day event.

Award winners were chosen from 106 submissions across 31 unique categories and covered campaigns from seven countries.

Data sourced from Interactive Advertising Bureau; additional content by Warc staff