August 15, 2016
Vadim Rogovskiy is founder/CEO of Clickky
The consumer now spends an enormous amount of time on mobile. Within the medium, the average user spends nearly 200 minutes in mobile applications daily, compared to 22 minutes on the mobile Web.
Users also have a tendency to spend more time in-app. In-app advertising already far counterbalanced mobile Web advertising.
Users are more engaged in-app, and they provide a richer data set, which is really convenient for marketers. This represents a massive opportunity for today's businesses, changing the approach on how brands are trying to reach you.
Here are five trends shaping the current state of the industry:
● Cross-device is new norm
● Video goes into minds of consumers
● Rise of in-app spending
● Messengers are up
● Next phase of personalization
Cross-device is new norm
Many marketers and publishers now add the in-app channel into their cross-device campaigns. And there are fair reasons to that.
As consumers become increasingly mobile-oriented, marketers and advertisers try to reach them where they reside.
Compared to mobile Web, in-app advertising provides a better solution to capture targeted consumers’ attention and encourage them to interact by allowing an uninterrupted experience.
Newer technologies also take advantage of what in-app advertising may offer, and take users to the very spot within the app that they are most likely to complete a transaction.
The ability to ensure that advertisers deliver the right ad to the relevant user seamlessly between the app and the Web is a field of ongoing improvement, and will only continue to improve its effectiveness within the next few years.
Video goes into minds of consumers
Mobile video ads started taking over as one of the most popular marketing tools available for advertisers.
Innovative media such as mini-games, video clips and other engaging formats are displacing traditional mobile ads.
Such popular ad channels go beyond traditional banners and desktop display formats. Besides being highly engaging, they also are adjusted to today's consumption habits, and positioned to encounter ad fraud.
This became the gateway for many big brands to spend more on mobile.
From a user perspective, this approach is well reasoned: If you are in the middle of a game, you don’t really want to wait for the ad to download. That is why marketers for apps and games take advantage of video to distribute their titles through these highly effective forms of in-app advertising.
Rise of in-app spending
According to comScore, mobile users spend nearly 88 percent of their smartphone time in-app, which exceeds the time spent in mobile browsers significantly.
Even though users are still reluctant shop on mobile, they often find out about an item on their smartphones prior to the purchase.
In-app mobile ad spend seems to be the future of mobile advertising. It will outpace mobile Web nearly 3-to-1 this year. This is not an opportunity to waste.
Messengers are up
In 2016, mobile advertising and mobile commerce are going to become better integrated into messaging apps.
In fact, mobile messaging has the broadest reach and highest adoption among mobile users.
Chat services such as WhatsApp, Line and WeChat are expected to gain 1.1 billion new users by 2018.
Social messaging is predicted to conquer social networks as the principal media activity.
You can already see it: Snapchat and Instagram both already are ad-supported.
WeChat started experimenting with ads in 2014, and Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making Messenger and WhatsApp ad-supported.
Messaging apps offer more engaging outreach options. They have the first-party identity data that makes Facebook and its counterparts so attractive.
Next phase of personalization
A new era of personalization opens up as more data becomes available.
Depending on the audience that marketers want to reach and the type of message they want to deliver, different mobile tactics should be used.
But within all the tactics, marketers need to keep an eye on the personal nature of the mobile device.
BRANDS AND AGENCIES can no longer focus only on mobile Web because in-app advertising offers marketers better possibilities for tailoring the more effective marketing campaigns.
Emerging technology is breathing new life into mobile ad campaigns. The larger quantity of data that marketers can get from in-app advertising is going to become the cornerstone of successful campaigns.
Video will certainly remain one of the most popular mediums in the near future as an increasing number of brands follow the trend and start mobile video campaigns.
The relatively close availability of virtual reality (VR) gear will also lead to creation of VR mobile video content and apps that will drive advertisers to experiment with VR mobile video advertising.
Marketers and publishers should adapt and evolve their media strategies to monetize these changing dynamics and attract consumer attention.
Vadim Rogovskiy is founder/CEO of Clickky, Odessa, Ukraine. Reach him at vr@clickky.me.
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