According to Juniper Research, mobile advertising will not be exempt from the recession. As a matter of fact, constraints on budgets imposed by the global economic downturn had resulted in an increasing migration of adspend from above the line to below the line channels.
On one hand, companies realize that the need for engagement with the consumer is increasingly going through a mobile phone these days, and quantifiable ROI is certainly appealing to brands.
However, this doesn’t mean mobile advertising is hitting prime time anytime soon — even by 2014, it would only account for up to 1.5% of total global adspend.
While a number of major brands had made relatively large investments in the mobile platform, it’s still a change when compared to the overall advertising market.
According to the report author Dr Windsor Holden, “These investments still form only a small proportion of a brand’s total advertising budget: Regardless of mobile’s advantages — its personal nature, the facility for highly targeted advertising — advertisers will not commit more budget until they perceive that the audience for their advertisements has reached a critical mass.”
Other findings from the report include:
- Mobile Internet will become the most popular mobile delivery channel for advertisers in 2009, and will attract the largest proportion of mobile adspend throughout the forecast period
- Mobile Cost Per Clickthrough (CPC) and Cost Per Mille (CPM) rates have fallen sharply over the past year in large part due the negative impact of the economic downturn
- Mobile advertising response rates remain substantially higher than those in other media
More information about the report is available from Juniper’s website.