• by Karl Greenberg , September 20, 2011

Automakers are moving into the mobile media market, particularly with location-based programs.  

Mobile automotive display advertising increased 169% from 2009 to 2010. That's 33,277 versus 19,724 auto, aftermarket, and related entities, according to comScore.

The firm has just released a new study commissioned by mobile network Millennial Media, based on a survey of consumers who get automotive content on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets -- aka "mobile auto consumers."

Millennial Media reports that worldwide, auto spending on its network grew 236% from the second quarter of last year to the same quarter in 2011. That means in terms of growth of spend, auto is in the top 10 global verticals on the network -- trailing only finance, retail and restaurants, and pharma. When it comes to amount of spend, the network reports that automotive is fifth in the U.S. and ninth worldwide.

ComScore says smartphone ownership is up 53% as of June this year, compared to a year ago, with 68% of mobile auto consumers doing so on smartphones. The comScore data says these mobile users tend to be young males ages 18-34. Also, women are 32% of the mobile auto-content population.

The study also suggests that mobile users who get automotive content are more affluent than those who do not. Among mobile users who make $100,000 or more per year, 34% of them get auto content versus 27% who do not. Below that income threshold, the tables are reversed.

Millennial Media says that 65% of ad content in its network is to smartphones, with "connected devices" and feature phones tied at around 18%. Within the smartphone category, Android has 54% of the Millennial Media ad buy, followed by IOS with 26% and RIM with 15%.

The study also finds that 21% of mobile users who get auto content do so every day, while 31% of them get that content at least once per week. About half get that content one to three times per month, according to the survey. Over half get that information directly from their mobile browser versus an app (25%), or SMS (37%).

According to comScore, mobile auto users also overindex for -- in order of an increasing difference between auto and non-auto mobile users -- weather, news, sports, entertainment news, movie info, tech news and financial news and stock quotes. For the last category, the disproportion reaches almost 50 percentage points, with 71% of auto content users getting financial news on mobile versus 22% of the total mobile audience.

Based on the Millennial Media data from its ad network, the mix among auto-category advertisers who targeted their mobile ads in May favored a local-market target strategy.

Forty-three percent of auto advertisers who targeted their ads focused on local in May, versus 35% of spend going against a demographic audience and 22% a behavioral audience. The firm says that auto brands drove three times as much site search, store locator and "view map" actions than any other advertisers. And consumers did "place call" actions on over a third of the auto campaigns in the second quarter.