Why Are We Not All Advertising on Mobile? Digital marketing firm eMarketer this week released U.S. data suggesting that Americans now spend more time on our phones than we do reading print. Whilst I don’t live in the land of Stars and Stripes, I have been spending more time on my phone since the moment Snake was released on my Nokia 8210 some 10-12 years ago. Maybe a bit of an exaggeration but you get the point. But this is not what I find interesting, it’s the fact that many brands and businesses are yet to adjust their advertising. TechCrunch states that Print still commands 25% of the annual advertising spend in the U.S. despite only 7% of our time. Mobile in contrast has just 1% of the annual advertising market yet 10% of our time. These stats tell me that a lot of people are getting it wrong. In Australia, we’ve only just been announced as the biggest advertisers in the world per capita. So how does our mobile advertising stack up with print? Well the answer is, I don’t know. This information is really hard to come by, even when spending 30 minutes Googling and trawling through every associated site in Australia. Whilst I came up with data from 2009, there’s not much point stating that. So I am going to make a massive assumption that we would be even further behind U.S. advertisers. So to the real question, why are we not all advertising on mobile? Mobile advertising brings all the flexibility and evaluation facilities as other online advertising, we can target by geographical area and by specific devices. Did I mention how cheap it is? Recent campaigns we’ve run for clients across the AdMob network cost $0.20c per click. Compare this to other online PPC models and it’s super cheap. Dig deep into the ROI and compared to local newspaper advertising there’s no competition (my opinion). Is it because we’re just getting used to having mobile-ready websites? Is it because we don’t have mobile-ready websites and we don’t know what to link to? There are other options, we can advertise click-to-call, click-to-map, we can have users download a file, or of course send them to your website. Seriously, we’ve now surpassed 50% smartphone penetration, we’re spending more time on our phones than newspapers and magazines combined, and in the next 18 months we’re expected to spend more time browsing the web on our phones than on laptops or desktops. Now is the time to switch your advertising spend to reflect the developments. Or if you don’t, well if you don’t, i’ll keep enjoying one of the more affordable and effective advertising mediums available.
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