Australia leads the US and Britain with one of the highest smartphone penetrations in the world, yet advertisers are falling way short of leveraging this, according to M&C Saatchi’s mobile division.
The agency has fused data from eMarketer and Google/Ipsos to find that ad spend per Australian smartphone user is less than one-third of the level it has reached in the US and the UK.
While nearly two-thirds of the Australian population has a smartphone – compared with 56% in the US and 62% in Britain – just $6.87 is spent on mobile advertising per subscriber here annually, versus $22.70 in Britain and $22.30 in the US.
M&C Saatchi Mobile Asia Pacific managing director, Chris Steedman, said mobile ad spend “should be catching up to where the eyeballs are”.
