Positive trends shows promise of mobile advertising
One of the most interesting elements from day 1 of the Mobile Web Summit in London was a few key statistics from a panel session on mobile advertising.
In 1998 the total advertising spend per unique user of the fixed internet was £2.60, it is already almost £3 for the mobile internet today in the UK. These were quoted by Alistair Hill (comScore Inc) and are based on yearly ad spend of £28 million (across display and paid search) with 10 million unique mobile users.
That ad spend was not all chat and ringtones either. 35% of advertising was for product-based promotion, primarily from the Automotive industry. Russell Buckley from AdMob was talking about million $ ad campaigns being deployed in the US, and Mark Curtis cited a recent Flirtomatic campaign for Strongbow resulting in 348,000 pints of cider being redeemed. All represent positive signs of significant uptake of mobile by brands.
The fact that 67% of UK mobile internet traffic is targetted at just the top 20 sites (of 167,000) illustrates that mobile definitely must be considered a unique interactive medium.
Finally, it was rewarding to see presentations from Yahoo and Oglivy reference campaigns which are running mobile sites on Mobile IQ’s Fabric platfrom – Citroen and Shelter respectively.
