Mobile analytics provider Adomic released a Q2 mobile advertising report. It covers a range of metrics and issues; among them, top mobile advertisers, most used ad formats and a comparison of programmatic media buying online vs. in mobile.
The top mobile advertiser in the US in Q2 was Progressive Insurance. Microsoft came in at number three and Amazon was number nine. On the PC internet, retailers are the top spending advertiser category. Yet there are only a couple on this list (depending on how AT&T and Verizon are counted).
There was also a significant gap between some major advertisers’ spending on PCs vs. mobile. Adomic said that American Express, for example, was the top single advertiser on the PC (probably just display) in Q2 while it ranked at number 30 in mobile. That imbalance will need to be corrected quickly.
Adomic reports that three out of the five “top mobile creatives” of Q2 were from Progressive Insurance. The company adds that “the top ad unit for smartphones is 300×250, which accounts for approximately 38 percent of all phone impressions.” Beyond this, “320×50 ads represent 30 percent of all mobile impressions.”
Another interesting finding is that for the top 1,000 mobile advertisers more campaigns are being bought programmatically vs. desktop campaigns (40 percent vs. 37 percent).
Most mobile ad creative is still very primitive or ill-conceived for the actual mobile user experience. Things are improving however. The IAB raced to standardize mobile ad units — prematurely in my view. While standards help promote adoption and scale they can sometimes kill creativity.
Programmatic is also often done in a way that de-emphasizes creative and makes ads less effective accordingly. Targeting is not enough by itself.
Hopefully we’ll see more experimentation and creativity in the next 12 to 24 months. A variety of new devices (e.g., watches) requires new approaches to creative and marketing. There remains a massive gap between consumer adoption of mobile technology and marketers’ capacity to market effectively on those devices.
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