App economy is going to take over media: Paul Palmieri of Millennial Media

Paul Palmieri predicts the “app economy is going to take over media,” mainly because “content and utility can never be separated again.”
While those two thoughts (shared during April’s Exec TechBreakfast) seem like old news, they’re relevant for Palmieri, CEO and cofounder of global mobile advertising firm Millennial Media. According to a report published last July by Juniper Research, in-app advertising is expected to hit $7.1 billion in sales by 2015.
As app developers find they’re unable to charge people more money for downloading their apps, they’re expected to embrace mobile advertising to turn a profit.
Despite weathering several sluggish quarters immediately following its IPO in March 2012, Millennial is poised to take advantage of the trend. After all, Millennial has been assisting developers with this for some time with its software development kits — it released version 5.0 for iOS and Android in April — which provide app developers the necessary API for making money by providing advertisers space within the apps.
It’s part of what has helped the Canton-based company become second only to Google in its ownership of the mobile advertising market.
Not everyone, however, agrees that in-app advertising will be what marketing agencies turn to in the forthcoming years, as a March article in the Harvard Business Review argued:

The best way for marketers to communicate through mobile will be with apps. Apps will trump traditional ads in part because consumers don’t perceive them as advertising—they value them for their functionality and thus don’t find them intrusive.

In other words, the app economy will take over media — and, at least according to one author, the in-app advertising market.