Mobile Advertising

We all know by now that mobile advertising is on the up and with that comes the stratospheric rise of mobile advertising. The overall global mobile advertising market in the US alone was worth $18 billion last year, this is twice that of its 2012 worth. What’s more, industry predictions say that this is set to grow by at least another 75% in 2014.

So who are the major players in the mobile advertising market? Surprise surprise Google are the dominant force in the market with just under half of the market. The next big mobile mogul isn’t too much of a surprise either, Mark Zuckerberg and his guys at Facebook enjoy about a quarter of the mobile ad market which means together Google and Facebook, just two companies now control over 65% of the entire mobile ad market in the United States.

What might surprise you is that whilst Twitter has taken the social world by storm and has increase its share in the mobile ad market, it still only has a fraction of its social networking colleague at just 2.4%.

So we can see how much the mobile advertising market is worth and who has a dominate stake of this almost inconceivable figure but why is it so lucrative in the first place? Well research and economic theory in general show that having a growing share in a growing market can be a really smart decision for a company and Facebook, with over half their 2013 4th quarter earnings coming from mobile ad revenue, would certainly agree. But did you also know that up until 2011 none of Facebook’s revenue came from mobile ad revenue, zilch. So in just a few years they’ve gone from nothing to the second largest player in the field.

You don’t have to delve very deeply into Google’s marketing strategy to see why they’ve got the biggest bite of the mobile ad pie. With the launch of its mobile Playbook it aimed to make mobile marketing more effective for other brands and of course this only solidified their position as a mobile marketing mogul.

Some marketers have concerns that the sheer size of screen space mobiles provide are a hindrance for effective mobile advertising campaigns, but as with most things, when done correctly this doesn’t matter. Google are fully aware of some companies reluctance to move in mobile marketing and Google’s Head of Global Mobile Sales and Strategy, Jason Spero has said ”Mobile is a great canvas for brand-building,”. “It’s going to produce some of the greatest campaigns in digital. But it’s shocking how far behind the [consumer] consensus the broad base of companies are.”

As we’ve previously discussed there are brands out there that have been able to channel the power of mobile marketing as see in our ‘Mobile Marketing success Stories’ post. There is also a growing confidence in how specifically we’re able to measure the impact of mobile campaigns beyond the initial click. Adidas, for example proved that by using store data they could determine the real value of a consumer clicking on a store locator button and found a correlation between the amount of clicks and the corresponding store’s sales.

Mobile advertising has huge potential if channeled and executed in the right way. If you want to get in on the action and see how it can catapult your business into the lucrative mobile market, get in touch with our mobile team at Papersky for expert advice.

References

http://mashable.com/2014/03/19/google-facebook-dominate-mobile-ads/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/10/09/google-heres-how-well-mobile-ads-can-really-work/