As smartphones uprise, mobile advertising becomes essentially important for businesses of all kinds.  It suggests a modern elegant way to reach targeted audience and develop loyal relationships between brands and clients. With a range of mobile advertising options, including video and push notifications, SMS, WAP, mobile app display ads, mobile campaigns become a necessary part of product promotion.

Adam Jablonski, CEO of Epom, a global provider of ad serving solutions, speaks on key trends in mobile ad serving.

The number of mobile advertising viewers grew nearly 30% globally in 2012, according to eMarketer’s research, and those numbers are predicted to double by 2013 and increase further in 2014.  At the same time, it’s important to realize that mobile is a rather different type of ad channel, requiring a specific approach, especially when it comes to apps. According to Cisco surveys, 52% of respondents claim to have reacted on advertisements in apps, and 18% have made a purchase directly from an ad in
an app lately.
In addition, 53% said they were willing to share their location in order to receive more relevant advertising. 76% said they would prefer to download an advertising-supported app for free instead of paying an upfront fee for one.

Be Local

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One of the most essential advantages of mobile advertising is the fact that you can reach your potential clients directly. It’s the key benefit for some advertisers, working in specific niches. Best examples illustrating the above statement are popular location-based check in apps Foursquare and its Russian analogue AlterGeo. These geolocation services enable users to unlock special deals from advertisers based on their locations.

People have a completely different perception of mobile content and advertising when they’re on-thego compared to when they’re at home or in the office. They are more likely to engage with an ad that is relevant to their current location, and this is an opportunity brands and agencies are rapidly embracing.

Create Rich Media Ads

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Statistics reveal the majority of experienced advertisers working with mobile ads, especially those engaged with popular brands, tend to lose interest in rather ineffective standards like the 300×50 banners. Instead, they are turning to more carefully designed rich-media ads.

Implementation of effective mobile and tablet ad campaigns is an exceptionally complicated process for ad agencies and brands, consuming plenty of time (the average of about 8-10 weeks for a mobile campaign) and effort. So, it is vital to use the right tools.

According to Apple’s recent survey, usual tools won’t bring anticipated results anymore. Interaction via video, sound, gaming, and so on will engage customers a lot more than exposure to standard banner ads.

Choose Apps Over Mobile Sites

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Due to the constantly increasing number of downloads of mobile apps, mobile ads are an in-demand format among advertisers. In fact, some advertisers have placed 70-80% of all their advertising on mobile.

There is a complexity with types of mobile ad management. Advertising networks frequently use SDK for mobile ads, which can be modified from time-to-time, suggesting that the developer has to update the SDK integrated into the app on the user-side and test the whole cycle again. Not only do these additional actions take more time and effort, but they can also lead to errors.

Fortunately, this process has become much easier after IAB claimed rich media standard MRAID 2.0. Now, in addition to standard banners customers can also use all kinds of rich media ads in their mobile applications. Epom mobile ad server dedicated a considerable amount of time to this aspect and became MRAID compliant.

A recent study has shown that in average smartphone users have more than 22 apps on their devices.  One of the biggest decisions for advertisers is whether to advertise on mobile sites, apps, or both.  Furthermore, with the wide variety of device types, operating systems, and screen sizes available, the decision gets even more complicated.
Apple is all about mobile apps, and Google is all about mobile web. How the whole system will evolve, depending on whether apps or web is chosen for a mobile solution, is hard to predict, but most surely both platforms will co-exist in the nearest future.

Use Video

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Owners of mobile phones are the fastest-growing audience in terms of consuming content, with video content now being the most dominant.  Video ad management presents a number of hurdles: screen size, connection speed and other aspects
should be considered carefully in order to provide users with the optimal media viewing experience.

However, in any case, interactive ads shouldn’t be disregarded, as they have already proven their incredible effectiveness. Mobile video advertising comes on a full screen and is highly interactive, highly scalable and hyper targetable — it’s an incredible branding tool.

To engage audience on mobile platforms, marketers will increasingly be embracing new video opportunities beyond traditional pre-roll, including interactive video-based ad units, ad-selector models, branded entertainment. Digital video will move to new platforms such as iPad, mobile devices and internet-enabled TVs.

Lastly, with the explosion of Internet video consumption, it is assumed that mobile video will also be developing fast in the coming years. It’s time to start adopting video advertising standards like VPAID and VAST, because this is the type of advertising to get more ads and better prices in the nearest future. Plus, with the introduction of common standard it will be much easier for advertisers to get their video ads out
to more places.

With video taking an increasingly important role in the mobile market, advertisers should keep aware of opportunities and try out new advertising options.  Though mobile is growing more quickly than pretty much every other segment in digital advertising,
mobile advertising is still a fairly small market.