Mobile overtakes desktop for the first time in latest IAB UK Ad Spend Report
Wednesday (12 October), PwC and IAB UK released the latest digital ad spend study, with the long-awaited news that mobile ad spend (£802m) has taken over desktop spend (£762m) for the first time.
In fact, it is mobile that has driven the growth in overall digital ad spend, which has seen a 16.4% rise – the highest first-half growth rate for two years. Mobile itself saw a 56.1% increase in the first half of 2016, meaning £0.36 of every £1 spent on digital advertising is now mobile – just five years’ ago, only £0.04 of every £1 went into mobile advertising.
Speaking of the news, Tim Elkington, CSO, IAB UK said: “People now spend more time online on their mobile than they do on a computer. Consequently, marketers devote more ad spend to mobile as they increasingly cotton on to the fact that people essentially carry an ad platform with them wherever they are.”
But, it isn’t all about mobile. Video ad spend hit £474m during the same period, representing a 67% growth. The mobile portion of that grew 129%. Video now accounts for 30% of all display advertising, yet 37% of mobile display.
Forty-eight percent of display spend now goes into social, with it seeing an increase of 43% to £745m, 80% of which is funnelled into mobile.
While there was healthy growth across the board, with all digital ad formats seeing mobile as the key factor in their overall growth, display and search experienced the weakest year-on-year growth, only seeing a 21% and 18% increase in all digital spend, respectively.
ExchangeWire asked experts from across the industry their opinions on the all-round positive news:
User experience must be front & centre
“It came as no surprise that mobile ad spend would eventually overtake desktop. The IAB report shows that, with the rise of mobile and native programmatic, there is a clear need to keep user experience top-of-mind. While being able to buy native programmatically is an exciting development, the industry needs to ensure that we don’t lose what makes native special, and valuable, in the rush to trade it efficiently at scale like any other standardised display format. Branded content (true, integrated native) is by its nature analogue, while programmatic by definition requires the digitising of information to make it work. This is fine for ‘regular’ in-feed native display formats; but we should be careful of extending this too far into the premium space – for the benefit of all parties, including the reader. Nor should we forget that native sits precariously on the border between editorial and commercial and, thus, needs to consider issues of transparency, trust, and not misleading the reader. It could be argued that this is a slightly counter-intuitive position for a programmatic specialist to take, but at MainAd we try to cut through the noise of the latest trend to find the real value, and we all have a stake in the sustainability of the ad-funded publisher model.”
Matt Keating, Head of Sales, MainAd
First published on exchangewire.com by Lindsay Rowntree. Read the full article here.