Mobile advertising spend is accelerating, with global revenue reaching $19.3 billion in 2013; nearly double the figure from the previous year. Marketers are recognising mobile, the device always on, always at hand, and highly personal, as the channel of the future. It is the most effective way to deliver targeted, relevant messaging to highly engaged consumers.
The industry is predicted to reach an inflection point where the majority of online advertising will be displayed on mobile rather than desktop. In the UK, mobile-only campaigns accounted for approximately 7% of total media spend in 2013 and this is predicted to leap to almost 40% by 2018, as well as surpass desktop ad spend in 2016.
Advertisers must have a mobile solution in place to avoid the risk of limiting campaigns to only a small proportion of their potential audience. However, today’s fragmented mobile advertising landscape still requires some cultivation and there are a number of friction points to smooth out before advertisers can take full advantage of mobile.
So what challenges does mobile advertising present to brands looking to solve the fragmentation puzzle, and how can these be addressed?
Discordant data infrastructure
Mobile advertising is just the start of the story. The final goal for advertisers should be to offer a seamless multichannel experience for consumers, delivering personalised creative regardless of channel or device. For this to become a reality, brands need the ability to accurately track consumers across all devices, leveraging all available data – first and third party – to drive relevant, personalised interactions.
The challenge here is that traditional forms of tracking, such as cookies, do not work across all devices, especially mobile, and data is treated uniquely in each individual ecosystem. The solution to this situation lies with tag management, which enables data to be shared across all channels and dynamic creative to be served from a single point of creation to any device. Recent advances in tag management now make it possible to provide a seamless consumer experience across all screens.
Multiple mobile environments
Mobile is usually discussed as a single channel, but there are two unique environments within mobile that present marketers with lucrative advertising opportunities – apps and the mobile web. While advertisers can track users via the mobile web, data captured from an in-app solution can prove far more accurate. Technology is currently being developed to further enhance tracking solutions for apps, and software development kits (SDKs) designed to retrieve data from apps natively, are already in the pipeline. With such a solution in place, advertisers will be able to implement end-to-end data tracking across all mobile environments.
Emerging mobile formats
Keeping up with mobile advertising is a challenge in itself as the landscape is evolving and progressing so rapidly. Formats such as mobile display ads are experiencing steady uptake, but the real growth areas are rich media and video which are seeing rapid adoption rates. When combined with the personal nature of mobile devices, rich media advertising delivers exceptional ROI. If advertisers can stay ahead of the game, these emerging mobile ad formats present a real opportunity to deliver highly engaging consumer experiences.
Mobile advertising is evolving and becoming more sophisticated. Once the above challenges can be overcome, advertisers will be able to deliver highly engaging, dynamic creative across all devices to create seamless cross-channel campaigns.
