With increasingly more time spent and more content consumed on small screens, all eyes are literally turned on mobile. Granted with only 5% of a brand’s ad budget according to Forrester, mobile advertising is still somewhat optional for marketers, despite the tremendous growth it has known in the past years. However, as it becomes more influential in the customer journey, mobile will account for more than 22% of all advertising spending worldwide in 2018, based on an eMarketer forecast.
Video will be one of the fastest-growing mobile ad formats in the near future – a trend heavily supported by the mobile apps market and clearly favored not only by the growth in the number, diversity of devices (with associated Internet services) and increasing size of their screens, but also by the rising number of mobile video ads pricing models and selling options.
Acknowledged as a highly engaging storytelling tool, video is a central element of the brand digital content strategy, having been adapted to bite-size pieces for mobile consumption due to new, mobile-centric user behavioral patterns. These mobile-specific content consumption models will further push brands to create entirely different, custom-tailored strategies and experiences, in which video will be a crucial advertising tool.
Paradoxically, the already overwhelming variety of devices – each with its own technological and user behavioral specificity that makes the linear targeting of the TV advertising model inefficient in mobile environments – will not slow the market down, but fuel it with increasingly deeper targeting options that will grow the relevance of video ads for mobile users.
Better targeting also means better analytics, both of which will allow for a more precise evaluation of campaign performances – which, in turn, will boost mobile video spending.
Mobile Video Advertising can be a Gold Rush if the complexity of the environment, still a downside for many marketers, is leveraged to discover better ways to deliver better content and evaluate campaign performances. As any young market, it offers plenty of room to innovate – when brands realize this is a major advantage, we will probably be witnessing the birth of a new generation of mobile video ads. – Cristi MIHAI, iManager, STRATEGAD.