The new mobile medium represents an appealing opportunity for brand marketers—enabling them to reach a pool of consumers that is growing by the day anytime and anywhere. Because of mobile’s relative youth, however, there is still confusion over how best to engage in mobile advertising. Differences in technology mean that marketers can’t always employ the same best practices in mobile that they use for television or online advertising.
Unlike the online medium, marketers are adopting mobile for branding purposes relatively early. However, mobile marketers and media owners say their inability to measure the effectiveness of their mobile efforts consistently with other media is one of their biggest pain points, and a significant barrier to mobile growth.
Mobile is now on the verge of becoming a mainstream advertising medium, and this report reflects a Nielsen-Digiday survey among advertisers, agencies and media providers about current mobile practices and what needs to be addressed in order to grow mobile brand advertising.
Overcoming the Obstacles
Today, marketers are deploying mobile campaigns on their own as well as a complement to other media. However, it’s this pairing of mobile with other mediums and focus on branding that gives rise to advertisers’ biggest mobile pain points. In fact, advertisers say their two biggest obstacles to further mobile growth are calculating mobile return on investment (ROI) and lack of relevant success metrics for their mobile campaigns.
So addressing this disconnect could pay large dividends: 30 percent of advertisers and 37 percent of agencies say the “ability to use the same metrics to evaluate audience reach on mobile as are used offline” would lead them to increase their use of mobile advertising.
