Commentary

Mobile Overtakes Mail As Top Local Ad Medium


As some of you may already know, I don't consider mobile an ad medium, per se. It's a device people use to interface with media, some of which is ad-supported.

And since mobile is also increasingly the best available interface for many consumers, it's also becoming the dominant one they use to access advertising in many categories, including local ones.

So I was not surprised when the analysts at BIA Advisory Services sent me an advance look at their 2022 local advertising forecast, which not so coincidentally predicts mobile will overtake direct mail as the biggest source of local advertising.

“For a long time, we’ve been talking about direct mail as the king of the share of wallet in local ad spending,” BIA Managing Director Rick Ducey states in the revised forecast, adding, “This coming year, for the first time, we pass the crown over to mobile, as its momentum drives it to be the biggest overall piece of the spending wallet -- and we expect that to continue in the foreseeable future.”

Ducey says there are four main reasons why mobile is poised to take a dominant position of local ad spending now:

  • COVID’s impact on consumers' increased time spent with mobile and other digital media, making digital the place to find and target consumers.
  • Digital’s overall momentum in winning more revenue share of media time from traditional media.
  • The rise of virtual consumer channels like delivery, curbside pickup and ecommerce in top categories like retail, restaurants and CPG, where physical channels like retail store visits decline.
  • Greater consumer acceptance and use of virtual and ecommerce channels.

So to some extent, mobile's dominance is attributable to digital's even greater dominance. Based on BIA's categorizations, "digital" will account for a 47.6% share of local ad spending vs. "traditional's" 52.4% share in 2022.

1 comment about "Mobile Overtakes Mail As Top Local Ad Medium".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, October 13, 2021 at 8:39 a.m.

     Of course the amount of money advertisers spend in various media does not necessarily correlate with how effective their ads are as communicators of brand positioning or as sales motivators---especially for branding campaigns. I realize that the various sources haven't the info but if direct response, search, and sales promotional advertising were eliminated from the totals----leaving only branding dollars---I'll bet that local TV as well as radio would have a far larger share of ad revenues than is shown in the table.

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