IAB and Ovum Reveal the Inside Track on Mobile Advertising in the U.S.
Ovum has conducted a ground breaking survey among marketers at 300 US companies to provide a unique insight into mobile advertising from a buyer perspective. The survey was conducted on behalf of the IAB’s Mobile Marketing Centre of Excellence with the aim of helping its members and the wider industry to understand better how mobile advertising and marketing is perceived by the budget holders for these products and services. The survey only involved companies that use mobile advertising and the results presented in this report are positive, challenging and often surprising.
Marketers in Tune With Benefits of Mobile Advertising
Mobile as an advertising channel has many appealing elements and what stands out from our survey is that this is understood and appreciated by marketers, with immediacy (57%), cost effectiveness (54%),increased engagement (52%) and reach (49%) flagged as top priority benefits by respondents. Mobile undoubtedly offers huge reach for advertising and in North America alone Ovum estimates there will be 335.44 million connections by the end of 2011 rising to 391.84 million by the end of 2016.
Another attractive aspect of mobile advertising is the potential for high engagement and personalization.Every mobile device is linked to an individual and is always on hand, meaning that connected devices are accessible through all the hours of the media day and have great immediacy. Mobile is a communication channel and as such is highly interactive and is effective in adding interactivity to other media that are not interactive in themselves. Mobile also presents opportunities for better alignment of the advertising message with its intended audience.
Marketers in our survey have clearly embraced mobile advertising with 31% of respondents saying it is part of their digital advertising strategy and fully integrated with other media, while 20% have it as core albeit not automatically integrated with other media. Fourteen per cent of respondents use mobile on a more ad hoc basis while 35% are at an earlier phase were they are still experimenting with mobile advertising, although as our survey revealed this can be on a large scale and involve significant investment. In fact the budgets being allocated to mobile advertising are in a very healthy state with28% of respondents saying their companies currently spend $50-$150,000 per annum on mobile advertising with 7% allocating in excess of $300,000 per annum. Fifty-five percent of respondents are at the lower end of the budget spectrum spending under $50,000 a year on mobile advertising.
