Rating: Blog draws heavily on Opera & InnerActive research
A very interesting piece from Levi Shapiro, who is a Professor in the Media Innovation Lab at IDC, which appeared on the Jerusalem Post’s blog here. In it Shapiro speculates that 2013 will become a year of consolidation in the mobile advertising world. “Expect to see extensive M&A activity in the next few quarters,” Shapiro predicts. The guy backs his opinions with a whole range of third party research but his chief sources are mobile browser specialist, Opera and ad exchange InnerActive. GoMobile News believes that Shapiro could well be right. look at the recent announcement from inMobi here, for example.The chief source for Shapiro’s arguments seems to lie with an infographic – ‘Mobile Advertising Monetization Landscape’ from InnerActive which you can find here.
The graphic shows the multitude of specialist mobile sector players who stand between content publishers and the advertisers themselves.
The list includes: – ad exchanges, ad servers; mediation platforms; mobile search; in-app payments; virtual currency; location-based services (LBS); mobile discovery; analytics; ad networks; rich media; video; and agencies.
Sadly, Shapiro didn’t reference GoMobile News‘ own definitive mobile advertising sector indexes which can be found here.
Shapiro also draws heavily from the conclusions found in Opera’s first State of Mobile Advertising 2012 report released here earlier this month [July 2012]. The full report can be found here.
Produced in conjunction with its own advertising subsidiary, 4th Screen Advertising, the reports concludes that rich based media is King.
“Rich media ads, especially those that leverage the capabilities of more sophisticated mobile devices, drive CTR (click-through rates) and better customer engagement based on the 4th Screen Advertising Rich Media Index,” the Opera report says.
The same report also features some nice stats such as, “The average eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) on iPhone is £1.82 ($2.85), followed by Android at £1.34 ($2.10); Windows Phone (W7 Mango) is last at £0.13 ($0.20) eCPM.”
Shapiro’s blog also mentions research from PQ Media which found that mobile is the fastest growing advertising segment (up 60.9 per cent worldwide in 2011, ) but still accounts for only 1 per cent of total ad-spend.
The blog also points out that, “Facebook has not yet found a clear mobile advertising strategy but hopes to leverage its dominance in online display advertising, where it controls 28 per cent of all online display ads.”
GoMobile News has to agree with Shapiro’s conclusion … “There are simply too many players standing between publishers and advertisers. The ecosystem can not sustain this many players, particularly those lacking global scale or rich media expertise.”
