Why Mobile Advertising Is a Must

Because of the limited size of a mobile screen, mobile advertising has often been viewed as a limited version of full-size advertisements targeted to personal computers. However, the reality has become the opposite. Mobile advertising now dominates the user landscape as an effective advertising channel.

The Engagement Factor

In decades past, before the advent of advanced analytics, advertising was analyzed on a broadcast basis. It was the idea of “this is well designed material – I hope the consumers like it.” Modern analytics allow advertising to be studied on a feedback basis. The focus is taken from the content providers and put on the target audience. In this way, wonderful, beautiful advertising content that for some unknown reason simply fails to spark the imagination of the customers can be quickly and summarily shelved in favor of more effective content.

This focus has revealed that mobile advertising is beginning to have greater engagement factor than its big brother, personal computer advertising, or even other marketing channels. This is hardly intuitive. Who would think that a smartphone or tablet could have even the same impact as a television spot? However, considering how many of us live on our mobile devices, this should probably not come as a great surprise.

The Data Tells the Story

Many are not hesitant to anticipate the advent of the predominance of mobile-based advertising. Bob Dorman of Baker Street Advertising in San Francisco directly states that “mobile will eventually become the predominant screen” and that it will likely happen “within 10 years.”

Sales figures from both Twitter and Facebook support this story. Both are enjoying double-digit gains per quarter. One of the reasons is that the challenges of designing effective ads for small mobile screens is now becoming easier, through the creation of advanced analytics. Facebook has announced the new analysis tool Atlas, which allows marketing managers to track usage across tablets, smartphones, and desktop computers. At the same time, Nielsen is expected to provide the television networks with a measurement tool that will associate the number of mobile views with the level of program ratings. In addition, Google is planning to release a new platform for rich media ads targeted specifically to mobile devices.

Dramatic Growth

For these reasons, exceptional growth numbers have been generated. According to eMarketer, mobile add spending has increased dramatically by a factor of 85% this year. This is up from $19 billion dollars at the beginning of 2014. By 2018, analysts estimate spending will have reached an amazing $58 billion.

Sales for the major players have increased accordingly. The Q2 2014 mobile ad sales reached an astounding 34% increase as compared to Q4 2013. Following this trend, sales are expected to reach $6 billion by year’s end.

The Fall of the Boob-Tube

In recent decades, many campaigns have lamented the time spent by children in front of the television at the expense of reading books or spending time with friends. Now the mighty is beginning to fall, and without the same fanfare. The key consumer demographic of 25-34 year in age watch 27 hours of television, video from DVRs or digital devices for 21 hours, and eight hours on their smartphones.

All of this information taken together underlines the importance for forward-looking marketing managers to embrace mobile-targeted advertising strategies.

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