With smartphone and tablet adoption now at record heights, it comes as little surprise that major brands and marketing executives are planning to allocate even more of their budgets to mobile marketing next year.

And the level of sophistication in these campaigns will increase markedly in the process.

IBM recently surveyed some 600 senior managers, the majority of whom are planning to ramp up their investments in mobile marketing by the close of 2014.

Fueling this accelerated interest is the fact that most surveyed industry leaders can already point to “measurable returns on mobile investments.”

According to corresponding coverage from Mobile Commerce Press, mobile marketing “has changed the way in which execs are participating in company strategies.”

Eric Lesser, the research director for the IBM Institute for Business Value, explained that CIOs will play an important role in the creation of more elaborate and intricate mobile marketing strategies next year and beyond.

Of course, there are still creative and execution-related challenges that come with the territory in the new age of mobile marketing. But they’re not wholly unfamiliar challenges.

“The mobile challenges that organizations are wrestling with are much the like the challenges they saw when dealing with the emerging Internet 15 years ago,” said Lesser, adding that the findings of the study indicate that an effective mobile strategy can provide “huge opportunities” for boosting consumer engagement to a degree never before experienced.