By 2020, spend on mobile advertising will grab 65 percent of all digital ad budgets, according to research by Zenith. Marketers are getting more sophisticated with their mobile strategies and pairing them with other channels such as video and audio. Here are some of the opportunities and challenges we expect to see for mobile in 2018.
Opportunities in mobile
· Visits: It’s now easier than ever to learn where a mobile user is going not just throughout their day, but over the course of months or even years. A pattern of regular behavior and habits—going to the gym, church, a particular coffee shop location—enhances the profile of who a user is, which helps marketers deliver more targeted and immediate marketing messages that can reach a user where they are.
· Mobile video: Eighty percent of video spend to be executed programmatically will be spent on mobile by 2019, according to eMarketer. With the IAB looking to test new standards for VAST video standards this year, marketers will be able to use independent third-party verification companies to provide better viewability and transparency.
· Mobile audio: The digital audio ad market grew 42% from early 2016 to 2017—$448 million came directly from mobile, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Streaming music providers such as Pandora claim that 85 percent of their inventory comes from mobile. Mobile marketers have the potential to reach podcast and streaming music listeners while they are commuting, cooking, at the gym, on their lunch break and in a variety of different environments that other channels can’t reach.
· Professional blends with personal: At the recent B2B Marketing Exchange event, Paul Peterman, Head of Technology and Connectivity at Facebook, discussed how mobile is increasingly becoming a vehicle for reaching millennials both during and outside of work. Fifty percent of all B2B researchers are millennials who are having increasing influence on buying decisions within their companies. According to Peterman’s research, 84 percent of millennials rely on mobile for work purposes while nearly two-thirds say they show brand loyalty to companies that engage with them on social media.
Challenges in mobile
· Fraud: Fraudsters have infiltrated the mobile landscape—app-install fraud cost marketers $2 billion last year, with nearly 40 percent of mobile app inventory thought to be fraudulent, according to a recent article in AdExchanger. Part of the reason for mobile fraud is the same as why we see it across the marketing ecosystem as a whole: proxy metrics. Download counts are still used as a primary measure of success for mobile app campaigns, and that’s easy to fake. What could help is not just better education around mobile programmatic and vetting of vendors, but also better assessment of a quality users through behaviors such as in-app events, in-app purchases or first-time purchases that can be mapped back to ROI.
· DSP + DMP integration: Contextual data from mobile can enhance traditional data to create more personalized campaigns. But mobile data is still not being easily ingested into data management platforms, and is often still being manually managed. This leads to a significant lag time in how long it takes data about mobile user behaviors to be ingested into a DMP to inform media buying campaigns. The answer is the ability to rapidly ingest, segment and optimize in real-time data from across all sources, including mobile, with the ability to activate audiences in an integrated DSP to prevent latency and data loss.
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