The Drum caught up with some industry figures to find out if the report reflected their own analysis of the market, and how brands and agencies should move forward in the space.
Paul Coggins, VP of mobile, Ebuzzing
I believe that the most important thing for advertisers is to reach their audience, not which device a campaign is run on. Given the rising numbers of people with access to smartphones and other mobile devices, advertising campaigns should focus on targeting consumers in the right environment at the right time with the right message. Getting the advertising format right is essential to a campaign’s success. Desktop advertising can be tremendously effective if the consumer is targeted with the right video at the right time – there is no point giving a consumer a 60-second ad on a smartphone. Short form, snappy videos, which we see on Vine and Instagram video, are the perfect content for this medium and will deliver optimal results.What the survey does tell us is that video consumption on mobile devices is going through the roof, great news for the advertising industry and for companies with cross-platform offerings like Ebuzzing.
Ellie Edwards-Scott, UK managing director of Quisma
Anyone who looks at their phone every five minutes, spends their lunchtime surfing Twitter and Facebook, or their evenings wrestling the iPad from the kids knows that mobile devices are the huge opportunity of our time when it comes to creating optimum placements for engaging users with creative, interesting advertising. It’s no surprise that BBC World News found that mobile ads are twice as effective as desktop ones, since there is a chance to be hyper-relevant and even more so, hyper-local when targeting users. Our next generation of mobile ads will no longer be intrusive, annoying or pop up when not needed since technology is enabling us to create more on-demand app download options which tie in with location data, creating a content proposition that users really want to be a part of. As an example – are you in Soho, is it nearly dinner time and does your phone know you’ve been trudging around London all day? Your preferences and location data point to maybe wanting to be targeted with a restaurant recommendation app download. Hyper-locality and relevance will be the way to make mobile the ultimate must-have advertising proposition for brands in 2014.
Nick Reid, UK managing director of TubeMogul
The consumer landscape is undoubtedly changing and now in 2014 there is so much more acceptance when it comes to mobile. The media industry is now making advertising that fits well into this space and is definitely one of the highest growth areas for everyone in marketing right now. Essentially, mobiles and tablets provide a handier experience for users and their consumption patterns mirror this ease-of-use and ease-of-switching between phones, iPads and more. Consumption rates on iPads do mirror that of TV viewing to some extent but viewing also varies a lot depending on the device. Tablet viewing peaks during prime-time hours (8pm to midnight) and we found that most mobile video ads are watched on weekends. Video on demand services usually operate on a screen-takeover basis and we’ve actually found that interactivity works relatively well. Click-through rates for mobile video prove to be higher on mobile than on non-mobile devices. The BBC World News study is looking into Australia, Germany, Sweden, India, Hong Kong and the US. Our own recent research found that programmatic mobile video inventory in the U.K. grew 49 per cent over Q4 in 2013. We saw an increase from 1.8 million auctions per week to 2.7 million auctions per week by the end of December last year. This growth was consistent and evenly distributed, with only one week (the final week in December) accounting for more than 10 per cent of the total inventory available.
Kathy Schneider, SVP marketing and communications, Criteo
What we’re seeing in terms of ad effectiveness is in line with the BBC study. While click through and conversion rates can vary considerably between advertisers and verticals, they are generally higher on mobile devices. And with mobile devices now responsible for an ever increasing percentage of our customers’ sales with more advanced advertisers seeing up to 30 per cent of their sales coming from mobile, it’s crucial for the ad industry to develop effective ways of reaching consumers both in browser and in app. The latter is particularly noteworthy - when you look at the breakdown of usage on mobile devices, interestingly, users spend more than 80 per cent of their mobile device time in applications, while the remaining 20 per cent is spent on the mobile web. The biggest challenge for advertisers therefore is uncovering an effective way to drive engagement through their mobile app after it’s already installed, since two out of three apps are never used after install. This is particularly key for retail, travel and classified companies who continue to struggle for an effective way to drive engagement through their mobile apps post download. We see mobile as the biggest transformation for marketers since the launch of the world wide web.
Daniel Gibson, digital director at Forward3D
At Forward3D we define effective as sales or signups; we suspect this is different to that used by the BBC in this survey. On this basis though and even with some hyper growth in mobile usage in India (one of the markets surveyed) we've not seen this level of return from our experience in global e-commerce. The key challenge to retailers in the next few years is to achieve mobile performance parity with desktops from an ROI point of view as mobile usage continues to take share from desktops.
