Meeker’s Internet Trends Call For Mobile Ad Innovation

Ben Plomion

Recently, agencies and brands took a collective time-out to dive into the much-anticipated 2015 Internet Trends Report compiled by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers analyst Mary Meeker. The data-driven report offers many notable insights. Not surprisingly, it also focuses heavily on mobile media.

How Mobile is Driving Programmatic Growth

Mobile continues to transform consumer behavior, and this shift is influencing the programmatic advertising industry in a big way. According to eMarketer, mobile accounted for more than 44 percent of all programmatic ad spending last year and is expected to top 56 percent in 2015. The digital display ad market is increasingly reliant on the third screen, to the point where it’s fast becoming the firstscreen programmatic marketers consider when devising their campaigns.

According to Meeker, though, the gap between time on mobile devices and mobile ad spend represents anopportunity worth $ 25 billion. While mobile ad spending overall was up 34 percent last year, marketers who make an even greater investment could see huge returns as more and more consumers favor mobile devices over their desktops. Programmatic marketers are ideally positioned to benefit from this. With the ability to deliver mobile ads that are location-specific and highly relevant to consumers’ needs, they can transform mobile users into mobile shoppers and repeat customers.

Vertical Viewing is the New Normal

Five years ago, Meeker says, time spent viewing content on vertical screens like those characteristic of mobile devices clocked in at just 5 percent. Today, it’s 29 percent. Mobile has changed the way consumers engage with content. So why are so many brands still delivering standard banner ads to mobile users?

To successfully engage them, digital marketers should design for mobile first, taking into consideration user behavior as well as the medium’s unique attributes. Consider an app like Snapchat. As Meeker points out, the Snapchat experience begins in camera mode to encourage immediate interaction. Full-screen vertical video ads on the app, meanwhile, have been found to generate 9 times the completion rates of horizontal mobile video ads.

Like Snapchat, Pinterest’s Cinematic Pins and Facebook’s Carousel format were also developed with mobile in mind. All demonstrate the importance and value of reimagining advertising for the small screen. Marketers keen to boost their interaction rates should look to formats like these and develop more innovative and mobile-friendly creative.

Programmatic’s Mobile Proposition

Ad format aside, mobile affords the ability to target on-the-go consumers – particularly when paired with programmatic. It creates an opportunity to design and optimize ads in real time, putting marketers in better control of the mobile advertising experience. Advertisers must offer creative that’s not only customized to mobile screens but to user shopping habits, content preferences, and product needs. Increasingly, a mobile-first approach necessitates a marketing strategy rooted in data, and programmatic can leverage users’ unique universal device IDs to serve more relevant ads.

The 2015 Internet Trends Reports confirms the time has come for marketers to go beyond the mobile formats of old. Brands should concentrate on developing ads that resonate with all of those users who are leaving their desktops behind, and the dynamic and responsive ads traditionally associated with programmatic are just the beginning. Native advertising, in-image ads, in-feed ads…these are just a few formats that can be seamlessly incorporated into the mobile content experience. The more inventive and mobile-ready the ad, the better the response.

Consumers have integrated mobile devices into their lives. The onus is now on marketers to integrate more innovative advertising into the mobile experience.

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