Advertising budgets for mobile channels are expected to buck the downward trend and exhibit strong growth over the next five years, our research has found.
Constraints on budgets had resulted in an increasing migration of ad spend from above the line to below the line channels: the need for engagement with the consumer, and a quantifiable ROI, meant that mobile is increasingly perceived as a key medium to achieve this.
However, the Juniper mobile advertising reportstresses that, while this is encouraging, the level of growth has to be put into context -mobile advertising remains immature and even by 2014 will only account for up to 1.5% of total global ad spend.
A number of major brands have made relatively large investments in the mobile platform, advertisers have yet to be fully convinced that mobile has sufficient reach to warrant substantive ad spend
These investments form only a small proportion of a brand\'s total advertising budget: Regardless of mobile\'s advantages - its personal nature, the facility for highly targeted advertising - advertisers will not commit more budget until they perceive that the audience for their advertisements has reached a critical mass.
Mobile advertising will also have to recover from the effects of the downturn: Mobile Cost Per Click Through (CPC) and Cost Per Mille (CPM) rates have fallen sharply over the past year. The good news is that mobile advertising response rates remain substantially higher than those in other media.
The internet will become the most popular mobile delivery channel for advertisers in 2009, and will attract the largest proportion of mobile ad spend throughout the forecast period.