Spending on ads targeting smartphone and tablet users almost doubled last year but still represents a sliver of the total.
Last year in Canada, mobile marketing spending on ads increased at an explosive rate, nearly doubling what it had been the year before, and yet it is still considered to be only a tiny fraction of the overall digital ad marketplace.
That said, if the growth continues at this rate, it won’t take long for this channel to carve a much larger slice.
This mobile marketing data is according to a report that was released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada. The report indicated that the smartphone ad revenue in 2012 came to $160 million. This was an increase of 97 percent over what it was in 2011. At the same time, revenues from online ads increased by 13 percent, bringing them to $2.9 billion. That still managed to beat the forecasts that had been established by IAB Canada.
This year, both online and mobile marketing ad revenues are expected to rise, but more moderately.
The digital ad revenues for 2013 are predicted to increase by 9 percent by the close of the year, reaching a total of $3.36 billion. This includes the 50 percent rise that is expected for ads over mobile marketing, which will come to an anticipated $240 million. These forecasts were created based on the advertising budgets that survey respondents provided to IAB Canada. These respondents included ad networks and exchanges, on top of online publishers. Those budgets reflected the first half of the year’s data.
The dollar figures have revealed that while mobile marketing does still have a great deal of potential as a channel over which to advertise, marketers are still only in the earliest stages of figuring out how they will be using the channel to reach their customers over these widespread and yet still quite new devices.
This also reflects a challenge that publishers face in being able to sell adequate advertising over smartphones and tablets in order to be able to recoup sizeable investments into the creation and establishment of their mobile marketing campaigns and smartphone based presence.
While it is important to note that the behemoth brands including Toyota, Google, and Amazon were using mobile marketing, it was also noted that 64 percent of the leading one thousand brands were also using advertising over this channel during that same period of time. This is a clear indicator that the method is not simply exclusive to the companies that are the largest in size.