• by Gary Danks , Op-Ed Contributor, January 7, 2016

If you Google “mobile ad spend forecasts,” you’ll only see positive results. According to eMarketer, this year UK mobile ad spend revenue will exceed £3bn – no small figure.

In the U.S., mobile programmatic spend will eclipse display programmatic spending in 2017.

The industry is growing. Fast.  

But the advertisers and the large agency groups that spend big aren’t driving this boom in digital media. Rather, it’s the mobile super brands like king.com and Uber that provide the impetus. The money spent by traditional brands and agency groups is relatively meager when compared to their overall digital ad spend.

So, why is it that traditional brands and agencies aren’t diving on mobile as an opportunity?

Problems with things like viewability, fraud and transparency definitely have a role to play. But I’d argue that many advertisers are put off by how confusing mobile advertising has become.

In part, it’s to do with the complexity of choice in the mobile ad market.

Over the past three or four years, there’s been huge investment (or as some argue, over-investment) in mobile ad tech, with investors clambering to get a foothold in mobile ad technologies, especially in the programmatic space.

The number of demand side platforms (DSPs) in particular, which allow mobile advertisers to buy inventory across a variety of ad exchanges, supply side platforms (SSPs) and publishers, has exploded, creating a parity market.

Now, advertisers are stumped when it comes to picking and choosing between technology service providers, which all claim to have the most intelligent algorithms, the fastest tech and best connected platforms. 

Most of them are good, just at different things, at different times.  The market is so fluid it’s almost impossible for the advertiser to know if they’re using the right technology at the right time.

 And, during the course of an entire campaign, they’re probably not.    

Then there’s the complexity of actually running a mobile advertising campaign. To deliver one successfully, advertisers have to navigate a variety of individual technology services (e.g. DSPs, SSPs, geo services, audience providers), all of which need to work with each other without disruption.

Unfortunately, it’s quite common that one or more of these technologies will not work with another, causing an element of the campaign to fail. This will often go undiagnosed, with nothing being learnt from the failure.

What can be done? Solutions have to come from both sides of the client-tech divide.

Most importantly, however, advertisers, agencies and technology providers need to find a better way of working together. Current processes are frustrating for both the buyer and the seller.

First, advertisers and agencies need to change their expectations for mobile advertising. Comparing mobile campaigns with campaigns on their other digital channels, which will have been fine-tuned for a decade or so, will only lead to disappointment. 

Second, tech providers need to simplify. Agency teams are endlessly meeting with sales people selling unpronounceable technologies, making unrealistic promises. Sales people are frustrated at being pressured into unrealistic commercial and performance goals. It’s become a race to the bottom.

Last, communication needs to be improved among all parties.

If the advertiser makes last-minute structural campaign changes “we need to use this new data targeting now,” this has huge knock-on effects to what’s already been agreed/booked with the technology platform.

The technology platform needs to communicate this and not just try to shoehorn in any last-minute changes.

During my 11 years in mobile advertising, it’s always been full of promise, and I believe that in the next year, we’ll start to see it really begin to deliver.

With so many moving parts, mobile advertising is complex. But better communication between the buyer and seller will improve day-to-day efficiency and campaign effectiveness.

That means we will all see big rewards, especially traditional brands willing to take the plunge.