It isn’t massively surprising, but the tiny nascent mobile advertising market ‘ driven primarily by search ‘ has almost doubled in the UK this year, says the Internet Advertising Bureau. It’s not surprising because that represents such a small amount of money and companies are not going to stop a new activity that promises much, and currently uses little revenue.
In the UK mobile ad spend is up to £28.6 million ($43.4 million) says the IAB with roughly half of that in the form of search advertising. The rest is sold as banners, text links, sponsorship, pre and post roll and in-game advertising.
What the IAB found impressive was the fact that it doubled in a recession, but with numbers that low we’re not sure it’s significant really, and the 2009 figures will show us far more.
The IAB mobile adspend research is said to demonstrate that investment in mobile advertising grew at a faster rate than predicted but the main predictor was the IAB, so what does that tell you, working with its partner PricewaterhouseCoopers. The study showed that mobile adspend increased by 99.2% year on year during 2008.
Paid-for-search advertising on the mobile internet accounted for £14.4 million, 50.2% of all mobile advertising spend, while mobile display advertising accounted for £14.2 million or 49.8% of the total.
Jon Mew, head of mobile at the Internet Advertising Bureau, comments: ‘This study is a UK first and means the IAB can accurately prove and track how much marketers are spending on mobile. The sector is in its infancy but is considerably bigger than the market was expecting. Thanks to these landmark figures we know the real value of the mobile advertising industry, and will now be able to chart the medium’s growth with confidence.’
To give you an idea for comparison online advertising was £3.4 billion, and accounted for 19.2% of all advertising spend in the UK.
In a separate announcement the IAB in the US released its Click Measurement Guidelines, which establishes parameters for the accurate buying and selling of cost-per-click advertising on the internet. The guidelines were agreed upon by key industry stakeholders, and provide for discarding invalid or fraudulent clicks.