I’ve been thinking a lot about the global impact of the mobile media revolution lately. Advertising Week brings with it IAB’s annual Global Summit, a gathering of representatives from IAB branches worldwide. In conjunction with that event we have published our third annual anthology of IAB mobile perspectives, The State of the Mobile World.
For 2013, IABs in 30 countries participatedmore than double our previous editions, providing a truly global view. Where our Global Mobile Ad Revenue study provides the cold-hard-cash point of view on the mobile regionally and globally, State of the Mobile World offers a more nuanced, qualitative picture.
And what is the state of the mobile world? Well, growingthe participation of more and more IAB’s in our anthology project underscores how important mobile is becoming across national and regional divides. But beyond overall growth, mobile is very diverse from country to country, and depends on whether the dominant mobile technologies are feature phones or smartphones, and slower data speeds or mobile broadband. Below are a few common themes that I discern.
- Marketers are playing catch-up. Whatever the state of mobile itself in a given country, in every market it feels like consumers lead the way, media companies are doing their best to follow, and agencies and brands, on average, tend to lag a bit, puzzled by mobile or unsure how to respond to the shift of the digital audience to phones and tablets.
- Location gets people excited. Regardless of the phase or state of mobile adoption, location is the universal unique selling point of mobile. It’s the thing that piques marketers’ interest, and first sparks creative thinking about mobile’s possibilities as a distinct medium.
- Video is coming up fast. Many participating IABs also cited video as a major mobile opportunity. This makes perfect sense, since video content is abundant and, assuming networks can handle it, an attractive content type for mobile consumers.
- Improving creative is our common task. In terms of industry challenges, better ad formats was very common, and clearly a place where the global network of IABs needs to focus our efforts over the next 12 months. Building future-proof mobile creative is a huge challenge, but collaboratively the IABs are poised to meet this challenge in the coming year.
We hope the IAB State of the Mobile World provides a useful reference for anyone looking to learn more about mobile’s evolution across countries and continents.