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Nielsen Report Explains 'Best Practices For Accelerating Mobile Brand Advertising Growth'
June 6, 2014 at 3:59 AM (PT)
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NIELSEN has released a new report showing new mobile medium represents an appealing opportunity for brand marketers -- enabling them to reach a pool of consumers that is growing by the day anytime and anywhere. Because of mobile’s relative youth, however, there is still confusion over how best to engage in mobile advertising. Differences in technology mean that marketers can’t always employ the same best practices in mobile that they use for radio, television or online advertising.
Unlike the online medium, marketers are adopting mobile for branding purposes relatively early. However, mobile marketers and media owners say their inability to measure the effectiveness of their mobile efforts consistently with other media is one of their biggest pain points, and a significant barrier to mobile growth.
Mobile is now on the verge of becoming a mainstream advertising medium, and this report reflects a NIELSEN-DIGIDAY survey among advertisers, agencies and media providers about current mobile practices and what needs to be addressed in order to grow mobile brand advertising.
Overcoming the Obstacles
NIELSEN writes, "marketers are deploying mobile campaigns on their own as well as a complement to other media. However, it’s this pairing of mobile with other mediums and focus on branding that gives rise to advertisers’ biggest mobile pain points. In fact, advertisers say their two biggest obstacles to further mobile growth are calculating mobile return on investment (ROI) and lack of relevant success metrics for their mobile campaigns.
"So addressing this disconnect could pay large dividends: 30% of advertisers and 37% of agencies say the 'ability to use the same metrics to evaluate audience reach on mobile as are used offline' would lead them to increase their use of mobile advertising."
Highlights from this report include
- Spending on mobile brand initiatives will grow faster than spending on direct response initiatives in 2014. One-fifth (21%) of advertisers will increase their mobile brand spend by more than 20 percent in 2014.
- Roughly three-quarters of new mobile funds will come at the expense of other online and offline budgets.
- Advertisers are increasingly using mobile advertising as an integrated, cross-platform tactic, and are running it in conjunction with other online (90%) and offline media (80%).
- Accordingly, marketers would “prefer to use the exact same metrics used in the offline medium, and additional metrics specific to the mobile medium” to measure their mobile campaigns (39%).
- Advertisers most desire GRPs to measure audience reach (37%) and brand lift to measure ROI (53%). Publishers, however, mainly report ad server impressions (78%) and clickthrough rates (74%).
- As a result of this misalignment, many advertisers (55%) are doubtful or unconvinced of publishers’ targeting claims and about mobile advertising’s effectiveness, indicating that the medium’s potential growth may be hampered by a lack of relevant metrics that are widely adopted and used.
- In addition to relevant metrics, there are other best practices that, if adopted, brands and agencies said would increase their use of mobile brand advertising, including:
- Alignment on and communication of campaign goals before the campaign start (68%)
- Monitoring campaigns for in-flight improvement opportunities (68%)
- Calculating the ROI of every campaign (77%)
- Measuring reach and ROI at the same time (70%)
The report concludes, "Media sellers and agencies that adopt these best practices and invest in what is needed to deliver these capabilities will be in the best position to capture resulting growth in mobile brand spending.

