Mobile Marketing Trends

The mobile app ecosystem has gone through a rather solid and steady growth since the launch of the Apple App Store seven years ago, and so did the products and marketing associated with it. Shortly after the launch of the App Store, a “land grab” playground arose, where lots of companies – especially gaming companies, such as Rovio or King – found success in a very short amount of time. Today, over 3 millions of apps are available to the end customers across the stores, which makes discoverability extremely hard. Mobile app developers need a really high value proposition to attract users to their products.

In mature markets such as US, current trends show that people use a decreasing amount of applications, but spend more time in those fewer apps. In other words, users dedicate less time to a limited amount of apps. Many studies and surveys back this phenomenon: in June 2015, Nielsen revealed that “70% of the time spent is done within the top 200 applications”.

Even as media buying continues its sea change from traditional direct order technology to programmatic, mobile advertisers struggle to unlock the potential of unified media buying at scale. Programmatic offers an alternative to the labor-intensive and inefficient process of manual direct buys, yet advertisers are finding publishers hesitant to get on board.

Mobile advertisers tapping into the programmatic opportunity should expect to see this resolved in the very near future, as penetration among publishers increases. In fact, programmatic ad spend grew to over $10 billion in the U.S. in 2014, and mobile’s share of all US digital ad spend will reach 72% by 2019, predicts eMarketer.

At the beginning of the month, our CEO and co-founder Tim Koschella had the opportunity to sit down with Korean IT media company Microsoftware for a passionate talk on the history of mobile advertising, the idiosyncrasies of the Korean market, the rise of programmatic and the future of the industry. Here is a carefully translated version of the interview. If you would like to brush up on your Korean, head here.

The Past of Mobile Advertising

The early 2000s marked the beginnings of online advertising in Korea. Portal sites and search engines such as Naver, Daum, and Google started to sell banner ads and the traffic was monetized through CPC ads. Korea had the particularity of having one portal site owning almost 75% percent of search queries. The so-called ‘adtech’ or ‘online advertising technology’ was not really necessary in this context.

Last year, we published the Global Mobile Games Landscape and highlighted the true potential of emerging mobile markets. We also dedicated a special series to Asia Pacific, ‘The Asian Beat’, to dig deeper and uncover both similarities and differences within the region and help developers and mobile marketers guide their go to-market strategies.

Most recently, Latin America has been drawing more and more attention, positioning itself in the global mobile marketing spotlight. Among recent changes: improved infrastructures, increased smartphone penetration and the rise of cheap mobile data.

In a recent report, eMarketer highlighted the growth of the mobile landscape in Latin America. In 2014, 20% of the population owned a smartphone on the continent. By the end of 2015, this figure should be 25%, and, by 2018, it will be a full third. Latin America is proving to be a strong contender in the mobile global app opportunity, expanding beyond borders and app verticals.

These important developments led us to put together the top 10 tips on why and how to invest in LatAm. To get a more in-depth understanding, we sat down with two experts in the region:(Patricio D’Amato, CMO of Recarga, as well as our very own VP International Hugo Gersanois), to get a better feel of what makes this region different and why is it worth considering and how you can adapt your go to market strategy. 

Digital travel sales is a $450 billion market worldwide (2014 figures by eMarketer). By 2017, 30% of travel sales in the United States will be generated through a mobile device (Statista). By 2018, mobile travel researchers will account for 71.3% of digital travel researchers in the US (eMarketer). Today already, 47% of travelers start planning a trip on a smartphone. Travel apps are, increasingly, where the purchase intent starts.To explore the huge travel opportunity on mobile, we teamed up with app store analytics company Priori Data and brought you an overview of the travel app category.

Revenues from mobile app installs ads are booming and the global app opportunity is getting much harder to ignore. Until recently, a large portion of the app marketing business was driven by the players at the forefront of marketing and advertising technologies, namely the larger game publishers. This phenomenon was mainly due to the category’s attractiveness to consumers and the high revenue potential of free-to-play micropayment-based business models.However, today we’re seeing an increasing market opportunity for apps outside of the gaming vertical. Transaction-based business models such as eCommerce and classifieds are skyrocketing on mobile and sometimes even leapfrogging desktop in certain mobile-first economies.

Last week saw one of the largest and most awaited mobile events take Barcelona by storm. Traditionally, MWC has mostly been about power display from the larger players (leading some to ask, is it too big?) as well as hardware product launches. However, today the show is no longer solely about hardware and, as testified by the success of the App Planet pavilion, service and technology providers are playing an increasingly important part on the event.Here are our three mobile marketing takeaways from MWC 2015.

However popular and hyped mobile advertising has become, the truth is that, as a platform and a practice, it is still in its infancy. Advertisers are always looking for innovative ways to communicate in engaging ways while publishers are in desperate need for better tools to integrate ads in ways that optimize monetization without hurting the user experience.The good news is, mobile technologies are constantly innovating, inventing and adding new features in order to improve the ad experience. To leverage these new technologies, “ad innovation labs”, teams dedicated to inventing and creating ever-more engaging and performing ad formats, are playing an increasingly bigger role.Drawing from our own experience at AppLift, here’s how ad innovation is changing our industry and benefiting all its stakeholders.

Happy New Year to all! As we enter 2015 we would like to reflect back on 2014. Over the past 12 months, there have been developments and milestones that have really made an impact on the industry. Here’s a monthly round up of the news, reports and stats from 2014 that will also likely impact mobile marketing in 2015.