• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, June 12, 2013

The brands are all here…and in some force. Ad monitoring service Competitrack finds in its first round of mobile tracking that 94 of the top 100 U.S. advertisers have run mobile ads in the last 9 months. Even among the next much larger tier of top 1,000 brands, fully 64% had a mobile ad in the market. Competitrack analyzed over 20,000 ads on Apple iOS and Android phones and tablets beginning in March 2012.

In terms of running unique mobile creative, Amazon led all brands with 206 discrete executions during the 9-month period, followed by Toyota at 198 and Google with 166. Farther behind, Verizon ran 126, followed by Target at 107 and AT&T with 106. Among the top advertisers, the mobile portfolio of ads represented about 20% of the size of their desktop display ads.

Nearly a third of all mobile ads captured (31%) were in the retail (16%) or entertainment (15%) segments, but a number of categories such as technology (10%), travel and tourism (9%), automotive (9%) and financial services (8%) are clustered in the next tier. Mobile advertisers appear to represent a wide range of segments even at this relatively early stage in the platform's development, suggesting a general buy-in among most industries.

Advertisers generally engaged a mix of mobile apps and mobile Web sites for their advertising, but ads seemed weighted toward apps. AccuWeather ran the most discrete creative units with 670 from 418 advertisers, followed by Pandora (453 ads from 261 advertisers), AroundMe (383 ads from 193 advertisers) and Disctionary.com (343 ads from 285 sources). On the Web site side, About.com (139 ads from 121 advertisers, ESPN.com (101 ads from 74 clients), Amazon.com (100 ads from 58 clients) and AOL.com (96 ads from 86 clients) led the pack.

And these advertisers are taking the platform seriously enough to develop units specifically for the devices. Competitrack found that 85% of the mobile ads they analyzed were designed for mobile.

Competitrack’s analysis shows that investment in mobile is neither tentative or selective. Virtually every major brand is visible on the platform. While their mobile presence generally is about a fifth that of their desktop footprint, that still is impressive given the youth of this medium. The full first report on Competitrack's mobile ad-monitoring service is now available online.