When Eyal Yechezkell started building mobile products and launching mobile marketing campaigns mobile has just started to gain traction.
“We had a hard time buying media for our mobile products as many publishers were not marketing mobile products,” recalls Eyal. Mobile was called the “third-screen” and followed the TV and the PC. Today, Mobile has become the “first-screen” we interact with eclipsing both of our TV and PC use combined.
Mobile is rapidly becoming the go-to source to everything we do including consuming media, communications, entertainment, shopping, work and play.
Mobile technology is faster and smarter than ever before and is completely integrated into our daily lives. Eyal Yechezkell observes that this surge in mobile daily usage is leading advertisers to reach consumers on their mobile devices.
One of rapidly growing trends in Mobile is Application usage. The mobile consumer has adopted this medium as the first choice when interacting with the mobile device. While the consumer has adopted the Web as the top choice for PC use, the mobile consumer prefers using mobile applications.
Eyal notes that one example in today’s mobile market that almost perfectly demonstrates both the shift to mobile by today’s consumer to app usage away from the Web and adopting mobile applications as the medium of choice on the mobile device is Facebook. Not only did Facebook users embraced the shift to using the Facebook app on their mobile phones, the daily usage per user increased as a result of having the app on the mobile device allowing users to check Facebook more times per day and interact with the platform more often.
Another trend in today’s market that Eyal observes is application advertising. Many mobile game developers and various application owners are looking to increase their mobile application user base and are looking for new mediums to reach those mobile users. One of the preferred mobile channels today used by many advertisers looking to generate application installs is in-app advertising. “Since mobile consumers are spending more and more time in mobile applications, advertisers are looking to reach them inside the app where a new user is only one click on the ad and one click on the app store away” Eyal notes.
What’s next in Mobile? While attending a recent mobile conference, Eyal believes the next marketing trend in mobile is video ads. “The shift away from PC and TV viewership to mobile devices is forcing companies to allocate a bigger portion of their marketing budgets to mobile in order to reach today’s consumer” notes Eyal. As consumers spend more time on their mobile devices, both brand advertisers and direct response advertisers will continue using mobile video ads to reach consumers to build their brands and generate sales for their products and services.
