Nielsen Explores 'The Mobile Tipping Point'

Tipping Point

A new report from NIELSEN, titled, "The Mobile Tipping Point: Best Practices For Accelerating Mobile Brand Advertising Growth" finds the new mobile medium represents an appealing opportunity for brand marketers -- enabling them to reach a pool of consumers that are growing by the day anytime and anywhere. NIELSEN notes, "because of its relative youth, however, there is still confusion over how best to engage in mobile advertising.

Differences in technology mean that marketers cannot always employ the same best practices in mobile that are used for television or online advertising. Unlike the online medium, mobile is being adopted for branding purposes relatively early. However, mobile marketers and media owners identified the inability to measure the effectiveness of their mobile efforts consistently with other media as one of their biggest pain points, and a significant barrier to mobile growth.

Through interviews with advertisers, agencies, and media providers, the report provides insights on current mobile advertising activity, the mobile advertising outlook for the coming year, and best practices emerging for measuring and optimizing 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% 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%)

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