• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, December 20, 2017

Is it time to stop thinking of the Web as mobile versus desktop?

David Silverman, a partner at PwC U.S., thinks so.

“Advertisers are simply following consumers, who live their lives online,” he suggests in a new report from PwC and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Likewise, Nick Law recently told me how qualifiers like “mobile” miss the point of what it means to be a modern marketer. “If there’s a chief digital officer at an agency, I know they don’t understand digital,” said R/GA’s vice chairman and Global Chief Creative Officer.

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard a lot this year, and it speaks to the maturity of mobile, and our evolving conception of media consumption.

However, without such distinctions,  I couldn’t clearly communicate some interesting developments.

For instance, for the first time ever, we know now that video on mobile overtook video on display.

That’s according to fresh findings from IAB and PwC, which report that mobile video ad spend reached $2.6 billion in the first half of the year.

Total domestic digital dollars surpassed $40 billion, during the first half of the year, which represented a 23% increase, year-over-year.

Mobile accounted for 54% of those digital dollars, or nearly $22 billion. That was a 40% increase from the $15.5 billion that marketers pumped into mobile during the first half of 2016.

Meanwhile, total social media advertising -- including mobile and desktop -- brought in revenues of $9.5 billion during the first half of the year -- up 37% year-over-year.

Chris Kuist, senior vice president of research and impact at the IAB, attributes the impressive growth to a mix of ingenuity and new marketing opportunities. 

“Varied audiences and advertising approaches can appeal to a wide variety of marketers in different shapes and sizes, bringing more dollars into the ecosystem and increasing the health of the interactive marketplace for all,” Kuist notes in the new report.

No matter how you qualify it, that bodes well for advertisers and publishers going into 2018.