A recent report by eMarketer, a market research firm offering insights on digital marketing, media and commerce, says by end 2015 marketers will have spent close to $21 billion in advertising on apps (compared with $7.93 billion on mobile browsers), showing a growth of 52 per cent when compared with 2014. The report further predicts in-app advertising will grow 10 per cent faster on an average than mobile web. Another study by mobile analytics provider App Annie and analysis firm IDC finds mobile in-app advertising revenue will grow over three times and overtake PC and mobile web advertising by 2018.
That is the global scenario. Now see what's happening in India. More and more e-commerce firms are urging consumers to download apps and access them through the mobile app rather than the desktop browser. Some are even throwing in extra incentives and freebies if you reached them through the app rather than the web browser. One or two have jettisoned PC access altogether.
Indeed, over the past year or so, an unprecedented number of brands have jumped into the mobile apps bandwagon. And, not only banks and e-commerce companies but many fast moving consumer goods brands, which had traditionally limited their digital presence to a Facebook page and occasional Twitter feeds and display ads, are following suit. Asian Paints, for instance, went the utility route (Colour Scheme Pro) and Cadbury created a game to forge some sort of interaction with the people out there. While you could continue debating if pitching a message on benefit (long term) is better than engaging them with a game (short term), the trend is clear: Apps are growing fast as a preferred platform for mobile ads simply because they address the challenge of better user experience.
Now look at the consumption data to get a sense of where the eyeballs are. Ad spend data from eMarketer show consumers spent about 18 per cent of their time on properties such as YouTube, which brought in 49 per cent of the mobile ad spending last year. In contrast, Facebook received 18 per cent of mobile ad spending for the 17 per cent of time people spent on its mobile properties. As for the rest of the apps, with 65 per cent of time spent, they received 32 per cent of ad revenues. This implies a large opportunity for these apps to monetise through advertising.
This also means large scale changes are afoot in the way advertising is executed today. The move has already started with mobile landing pages moving from plain old URLs, to deep links within apps. Also, mobile creatives cannot continue with the banner ad format. There will be more native, interstitial and capture or takeover ads with highly interactive content. So, you might see a brand ad strategically placed on the checkout screen on your app with the product pre-filled in the cart.
As things stand, the onus of a mobile advertising campaign is app install; in the next phase, it will move to engagement and then to transactions. With analytics, it is easy to target different people at different times of the day with different messages that are better placed to trigger a transaction. Given that, cross-channel optimisation will be key on mobile. That means there will be a move to seamlessly integrate search (say, Google), social (Instagram, Facebook) and display. Think of omni-channel retail: The marketer wants to close a sale, he does not care about what channel closed the sale - the sale is important. The same logic will be at work across all online platforms.
That said, one must remember a huge chunk of mobile users still prefer the browser because it offers access to all the content they want, at one place. They don't have to switch between different applications for different pieces of information.
Also, remember marketers don't discuss platforms at the outset: They discuss reach because that gives a sense of platform that would be best suited to access an audience set. For an FMCG brand, the rural audience may be important; in that case mobile web can provide a wider reach because there are fewer smartphone users out there. However, for an automobile company that needs to advertise its premium brand and a new retail channel, it would be worthwhile to pick up the best apps in business news because the target group would already be there.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
