How Mobile Made its Mark in 2014, Part 1 of 2

Mobile advertising
Image courtesy of intrinsicservices.com

It has been said for the last several years that mobile is coming and it will dominate the digital market. Well, the time has finally come when mobile is here and is in fact dominating. With heavy-hitting mobile apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr, it comes as no surprise that mobile is a driving force in today’s digital market.

Sales numbers support the claim that mobile is taking over. EMarketer forecasted that mobile advertising brought in $32.71 billion globally in 2014. That is more than newspaper, magazine, and radio spend combined. Forrester Research predicts that mobile will take over 40 percent of total online display ad budgets by 2019. Taking all of this hard data into consideration, let’s take a retroactive look at the progression of mobile advertising in 2014 and the landmark advancements that were made in the mobile landscape.

Mobile video ads are worth the effort
With more and more social platforms supporting video advertising, brands began venturing more willingly into the relatively uncharted territory of video. Instagram released sponsored video ads in 2014 and some big name brands spearheaded the new venture, including Disney, Lancôme, and Banana Republic. Twitter and Tumblr also built out advertising options to support video, and brands that participated saw massive return on their investment. Any digital marketer knows that video has the potential to engage the most people and thus gain more traction on social media platforms. So, it seems only logical that all the of the top social platforms would leverage the opportunity to support video advertising.

Social platforms venture into ecommerce
Twitter reported earning 85 percent ($272 million) of its revenue from mobile during the third quarter of 2014. This increase in mobile revenue is likely a result of Twitter’s “buy button” that was introduced in September 2014. These buy buttons can be easily plugged into advertisers’ tweets to help drive sales directly from Twitter. Home Depot and Burberry were among the first to try out the new feature in Twitter, and brands found that the button converted Twitter from a news site to more of a direct-response platform. Following Twitter’s success, Buzzfeed and Tumblr were quick to introduce similar buy button functions.

Push notifications tread lightly
With Apple’s introduction of iBeacon in 2013, the land of geotargeted push notifications was mapped out. It wasn’t until this year when big name brands decided to give the technology a try. Walgreens, Urban Outfitters, and Marriott are among the many big name brands that ventured into the relatively uncharted territory of location-based mobile advertisements. However, brands need to watch their level of advertising with push notifications, whether they are geographically, calendar, or activity based. Consumers find these types of advertisements to be the most intrusive and downright annoying.

Facebook’s data goes beyond the platform
Facebook is a data hoarder, and this year they introduced the Atlas ad server that gives advertisers access to 1.3 billion users’ data. The hope is that this plethora of data on Facebook users will help mobile marketers compensate for the lack of cookie data available in mobile marketing.

In tomorrow’s blog we will continue the countdown for mobile marketing progress in 2014.

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