Commentary

Infant Mobile Advertising Faces Significant Hurdles

Infant Mobile Advertising Faces Significant Hurdles

The recently published Media Analyst Screen Digest report entitled Mobile Media  Advertising Opportunities..." , including an exclusive survey of GroupM's advertising agencies in 25 countries, finds that the market for rich media advertising on mobile will reach $2.79 billion by 2012, with global mobile TV advertising accounting for the lions share at $2.44 billion.

By 2012, says the report, advertising will account for over 20% of mobile TV revenues, but without its own metrics it will struggle to be considered a stand alone advertising channel. Mobile Video-on-Demand advertising will be small in comparison, reaching Euro $336million in 2012 by supporting extracts from popular programms and sponsoring recurring content such as news and weather forecasts.

In terms of delivering advertising revenues, Screen Digest believes that games, UGC and music will disappoint. However, these formats will provide a valuable source of innovative marketing opportunities for brands aspiring to connect and interact with their customers. The study predicts that by 2012 over 60 million ad-funded mobile games will be downloaded per year worldwide.

Yet despite these benefits, mobile advertising is very much in its infancy, concludes the study. To date only 15% of the advertising executives surveyed in GroupM's agencies had used mobile advertising, either as a stand alone or integrated campaign, underlining the view that this is an emerging technology.

Of those agencies, 75% had used mobile content at least once as a promotional item, while 67% had at least once placed an ad in rich media. The reasons given for not incorporating it into ad campaigns included poor user experience and usability, handset limitations and the lack of clear measurement metrics.

Julien Theys, one of the authors of the report, says "Data pricing structures, handset and mobile web usability, content quality and the lack of audience metrics to measure effectiveness are preventing mobile advertising from reaching its market potential... mobile media advertising will have to compete with search, display, messaging advertising... (and) innovative uses of mobile in marketing campaigns."

For more information, please visit Screen Digest here.

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