Australian Mobile landscape.
April saw the publishing of the 2nd Annual IAB Mobile Landscape Study. Research partner TNS conducted the Study which covered four areas; How is Mobile being used? Does it work? What’s coming up? And lastly, where are the challenges? It’s a pretty extensive exercise, and a valuable view of the sector. Respondents were characterised in this 2nd study, as those that are active in the sector be they brand side, agency, or publisher, so one would surmise they are informed and seeing the pros and cons clearly.
So how is Mobile being used?
Well in essence more broadly. As mobile matures as a marketing medium, so does its application to address different objectives. Amongst buyers, Brand Awareness came out top at 82%, with Increase Engagement at 80%, followed by Sales, and then Promotional related activity. I think the top two rankings are a combination of spend flowing out of traditional mediums, rapidly improving audience targeting in mobile, and the developing creative abilities of smart devices. Utilisation of display is almost ubiquitous which is to be expected now, but the rise of Video sees utilisation of this product type on smartphone at 82%, and on tablet at 76%. Video has emerged as the force we knew it would be, and we will see its importance and future critical role in the ecosystem really form through the next 12 months, not just as media owners switch on video scale, but also an new B2B models from e.g. YouTube enter the market, plus of course via brands themselves investing in content. As mentioned above, targeting is a contributor to the growing confidence amongst buyers. It’s good to see that ‘Time of Day’ (72%), and ‘Specific Location’ (70%) are so prevalent, and in terms of what buyers feel are most useful, ‘Detailed Demos’ was second only to ‘Location’. Also a first attempt was made to get a read on mobile and programmatic trading with 48% of buyers saying they were ‘sometimes’ (42%) or ‘always’ (6%) active in mobile in this way. We all know this space is nascent and fairly confused, (in fact almost a third were ‘Don’t Know’ in that question), so I think there will be differences in how organisations define ‘programmatic’ and therefore the interpretation of the question. However, Australia is viewed as one of the worlds quickest evolving programmatic markets, and there are sizable claims being made by media owners, so I think we should treat this as a useful baseline. Lastly, in this section, a good view on what metrics are being used to get an understanding on how well a campaign is performing delivered a clear indication, that the toxic stranglehold of the CTR metric is over with other measures such as interactions, download behaviours, and leads being captured and passed, are ranking equally along side of CTR.
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