The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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By Katie Deighton, Senior Reporter

April 26, 2016 | 2 min read

The overall mobile advertising experience is set to improve notably across the next year, according to Alan Fagan, group sales director for the EMEA region at ESPN.

Fagan explained that while close to two thirds of ESPN’s UK audience are now consuming content via mobile, advertisers and developers have not caught up with this platform demand.

"I think that’s going to be a big change - not even in the next three years but in the next year - where the advertising options on mobile are going to get a lot more sophisticated and work a lot harder,” he said.

"There’s still a big gap between the amount of money going into mobile and the amount of consumption of mobile.”

Speaking after a talk with heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua at Advertising Week Europe, Fagan also explained that advertising experience is soon to change within the video space too - especially in the world of sport, where quick online clips are prevalent.

He said: “There’s lots of highlights or live clips out there that are snackable bits of video content. I can’t - and will not - stick 30-second pre-rolls or even 15-second pre-rolls in front of that, the user experience is horrible.”

As such, Fagan believes we’ll be seeing “a lot of different lengths of video” in the sports realm, as well as pre-roll ads being touted as an alternative to TV ads.

"Theres lots of very good sites out there but there is going to be a bit of a shrinkage of the market,” Fagan added. "Not every site can be a destination site and [in the future] I think we’ll see the destination sites getting a higher share of the total spend.”

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