8 facts about mobile internet advertising

8 facts about mobile internet advertising
In the past two years, mobile advertising has brought a new reality At least judging from advertising revenue, Facebook is already a mobile Internet company. Throughout 2014, Facebook earned $7.43 billion from mobile advertising, accounting for 60% of its total revenue. Considering its status on the Internet, it is no exaggeration to say that we have truly entered the era of mobile Internet. Since July 2014, the platform has added 500,000 active advertisers, bringing the total to 2 million. The shift has been rapid enough for both mobile advertising and Facebook. Two years ago, Facebook was in a difficult situation, especially on the eve of its IPO. General Motors, the third largest advertiser in the United States, announced that it would stop paid advertising on Facebook and even said that the click-through rate of ads on Facebook was far lower than that of Google and did not even meet general Internet standards. Immediately afterwards, the stock price fell all the way after listing and remained below the issue price. While the company was frequently poured cold water on, it was also criticized by the outside world for its "single advertising model and weak mobile field." Two years later, Facebook proved its worth to investors with mobile advertising.

For Twitter, mobile advertising is a matter of life and death, as it has become Twitter's most important form of advertising revenue (although it has not yet made a profit), bar none. According to Twitter's financial report for the first three quarters of 2014, its mobile advertising revenue accounted for 75%, 81% and 85% of its total advertising revenue, respectively. As Facebook and Twitter's mobile advertising market share increased, advertising giant Google's mobile advertising share was further compressed, falling from 46.6% in 2013 to 40.5% in 2014. Market research firm eMarketer also estimates that its market share will fall to 35.17% in 2015. Meanwhile, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has incorporated mobile advertising into her turnaround strategy and has made large investments in mobile, such as acquiring mobile ad network Flurry in the summer of 2014. The development speed of the Chinese market is equally astonishing. eMarketer said in its report that China's mobile advertising market grew sixfold to $6.4 billion in 2014, accounting for 16% of the world's total mobile advertising spending. WeChat Moments ads, which copied the Twitter and Facebook information flow advertising model, also let us feel the power of mobile advertising more intuitively, and at the same time gave this social platform with 438 million monthly active users a clearer way to make profits. Up to now, we can basically make some definite judgments about mobile advertising. The following are some of our summaries and analyses. I hope this will give you a glimpse into the world of mobile advertising as a whole. Information flow ads have replaced banners and become the most mainstream advertising display method As the original form of online advertising, banner advertising, also known as banner advertising (or banner advertising), may be the form of online advertising that you are most familiar with. In the PC era, it always appears at the top, middle or bottom of the web page you open. It is a picture that runs horizontally across the web page. However, it is not limited to static pictures. Multiple frames of images can be spliced ​​into animated images. Although the banner now seems old-fashioned and outdated, we cannot ignore its influence. When mobile advertising was just emerging, banners were the marketing industry’s initial concept for mobile advertising, and they were directly transplanted onto mobile phones. Because of this, the small screen size of mobile phones is considered a defect, and marketers' doubts about mobile advertising are more focused on this point. But news feed ads have allowed people to see another possibility. This is thanks to the popularity of social networks and waterfall-style content display. Twitter probably didn't expect that this information flow advertising model would become popular when it first tried the (Promoted Tweets To Followers) advertising plan in 2011. But Twitter did not get much of an advantage; instead, it was Facebook that popularized this advertising model. Since launching news feed ads in the second quarter of 2012, Facebook's mobile advertising revenue has grown rapidly, from 14% in the third quarter of 2012 to 69% today. "Mobile devices account for 85% of Facebook's monthly active users, and 35% of them use mobile phones as their only access point. The continued growth of mobile users will naturally lead to an increase in Facebook's mobile advertising revenue. At the same time, Facebook's acquisition of apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp has also brought it more support on the mobile side." Greg Paull, founder and global CEO of management consulting firm R3, told Curiosity Daily, "Now, users access social media through mobile devices for 50% of the total time, and this proportion is still rising." Sina Weibo and WeChat Moments later followed suit, imitating this advertising model of embedding ads into users’ information flows. Meanwhile in 2014, you may have heard more of this in the news. For example, Instagram signed a $40 million advertising agreement with communications group Omnicom Group, which allows brand clients of the latter's multiple media and advertising agencies to place advertisements in Instagram's photo stream. Pinterest has begun experimenting with selling advertising, and counts Unilever, Gap, Four Seasons Hotels, Kraft Foods and others on its client list. After being acquired by Yahoo, the microblog Tumblr also inserted information flow advertisements in the form of ordinary blog posts in 2013. GE, Warner Bros., and ABC were the first buyers of Tumblr's advertisements. In addition to these social networking sites, you can also feel the presence of information flow ads in other news or shopping guide applications. For example, there is Buzzfeed abroad, Toutiao in China, and of course e-commerce platforms and shopping guide websites such as Taobao and Meilishuo. In the few seconds when you casually swipe your phone, an information flow ad may pass through your fingertips. Waterfall content platforms are relatively safer Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp abroad, or Weibo, WeChat Moments, Zhihu and other social platforms in China, including the new media apps such as Buzzfeed and Business Insider that have been popular in recent years, if you pay attention, you will find that their presentation method is waterfall flow (Curiosity Daily also has this design). 

"The information feed is where users expect to see content that interests them, whether it comes from friends or other people. It can be said that the audience here is more easily 'captured' and more willing to accept information from brands," said Greg Paull. As long as information feed ads always push content that users are willing to read or that is relevant to them, they will always be popular. But a lot depends on how it is presented on various platforms and how advertisers use it. Therefore, brands also favor this form of advertising because it makes the ads appear more natural. Of course, content platforms need to control the amount of advertisements they push. If more than 50% of the information flow on a screen is advertisements, it will completely ruin the user experience. When information flow advertising becomes a major advertising method, having a waterfall flow means it is easier to achieve commercialization, but the process is not easy, and it is still related to the user base and active users you have. Social is more attractive than search People's search habits on PC are changing. When you want to know the weather, you will open a weather app to check; when you need to decide what to eat in the evening, maybe you will check Dianping.com; when you want to watch a movie, you can directly open the app that sells movie tickets or group buying; and when you don’t have any apps, the first thing you may think of is to download a related app from the App store. We are moving further and further away from mobile searches, and you are spending more time on social platforms. 

Facebook remains the most popular app worldwide, with 1.19 billion monthly active users on mobile. Social apps such as Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, Line, and Vine all saw significant growth in active users in 2014, ranging between 30% and 57%. Users spend an average of 1.72 hours per day on social networks. In China, according to a mobile social report released by Nielsen Netcom, 92% of respondents use mobile social apps every day, and the average time each user spends on social media is 1.5 hours per day. WeChat, with 438 million monthly active users, accounts for the majority of this. Money will flow where the users are. So you can see that Google's mobile advertising market share has been being divided up, and the advertising prices of Google, known as the "king of clicks," are also falling. Facebook is different. "When we used to ask people, 'Do you want to advertise on Facebook?' It was always complicated," said Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. "Now you just post something and ask them if they want more people to see it." After the first wave of advertisements flooded the WeChat Moments, a large number of advertisers have already lined up. Big data, it seems to be more useful Big data can lead to precise advertising delivery, which is the biggest selling point for Internet companies when selling advertising. We have witnessed its power even in the PC era. For example, the book recommended to you by Amazon may be the one you want to read; if you search for a pair of headphones using Google or Baidu, you will see advertisements for the headphones in many places. But these are all data based on users' active searches, and searches always have a certain degree of randomness. These companies don't really know what the person sitting on the other side of the computer is like. 

On social networks, the user's appearance seems to be clearer. Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann once explained that Facebook is "about your contacts, your past and your memories," with users voluntarily providing all kinds of personal information, such as birthdays, alma mater names, emotional states, etc., and the social network can use this information to push highly targeted ads. The user information Twitter holds is not as detailed. Its value lies mainly in "happening" events, allowing advertisers to use real-time discussions of hot events for brand promotion, such as the World Cup, presidential elections, popular TV series, etc. And "Pinterest is about what you aspire to do, what you want to do next." When a user pins a photo of a wedding dress or a picture of home decor, he or she may be saying that he or she needs these things. Based on this, user data on social networks also appears to be more valuable and targeted. Although the big data analysis of the first wave of advertisements circulated in Moments was criticized, in a previous interview with some advertisers by Curiosity Daily, they all said that big data is still the biggest advantage of WeChat marketing. Based on its huge user data, positioning can be more accurate. But this is not the only advantage, many social platforms can achieve this level of accuracy. Mobile advertising has limited appeal for brand image, now it is more about promotion Although the mobile advertising market is booming, with eMarketer predicting mobile advertising revenue will reach $31.45 billion in 2014, surprisingly, mobile advertising is not currently being adopted by most Fortune 500 companies. According to a survey by Forrester, a US technology market research company, mobile advertising only accounts for 5% of the total advertising budgets of these well-known brands, and most of the brands that have tried mobile advertising have no plans to increase their mobile advertising budgets. So where does this money come from? A large part of them come from mobile application developers, which gave birth to a special type of app installation advertising. The prosperity of mobile Internet has stimulated the emergence of a large number of applications, and also a group of application developers who have become rich overnight, especially in the field of mobile games. In order to quickly gain popularity, the fastest way is to invest heavily in advertising. Nanigans, a third-party advertising agency, once reported that 74% of Facebook's mobile advertising revenue came from mobile app installation ads. In addition, Twitter has also started launching mobile app install ads since April 2014. If this type of advertising is only to guide users to download mobile applications, we can tentatively understand it as an advertisement that directly promotes sales. After all, for a variety of apps, there is rarely any brand effect. What we need to be vigilant about is that it is still unknown how long the app installation advertising market can prosper, after all, most of them rely on venture capital. 

Big brands also use mobile devices more for promotion. In 2012, Walmart bought 50 million mobile ads on Facebook and set them to be sent to Facebook users for 72 consecutive hours starting from Black Friday. The content was all about Walmart's special products. During this period, Facebook also regularly reported data such as the number of ad clicks, shares, and likes so that Walmart could make advertising adjustments. When Walmart discovered that its $88 sneakers were not selling well, it immediately promoted the product as a "special offer" on Facebook, only to have them sell out soon after. According to Forrester research, 57% of brands said that their spending on mobile advertising is mainly aimed at increasing brand awareness and recognition. The generous advertising sponsors that TV has are more likely to use brand image advertising, which is also the reason why YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are vigorously promoting video advertising. Long video ads are still very traditional, short video ads may have more potential in the future Based on the experience of TV advertising, brands are more familiar with video advertising, which can also help them convey more brand or product information. Whether it is Facebook, Google, Twitter or Yahoo, they are all trying to get a piece of advertisers' television advertising budget. But it should be noted that the threshold for video advertising on mobile devices is still very high. 

When using computers, we don’t have the concept of traffic in our minds, but everything is very different on mobile devices. The price of traffic exceeding the package fee is not cheap. Although mobile phones can be taken anywhere, WiFi cannot, so the priority here is text>picture>video. Considering the display effect of the advertisement and the fact that text is too monotonous, pictures have become the most cost-effective choice for mobile advertising. On the other hand, even though mobile advertising is evolving rapidly, video ads still appear before or after video content, just like on PC many years ago, and their length remains at 15 seconds or 30 seconds, just like traditional TVCs. You can see ads on their app videos on Youku, LeTV, or anywhere you can log in to YouTube. It must be admitted that this is also a part of mobile advertising, even though it looks very "traditional". Perhaps you have already thought of this more compromise method: short video. Think about the 6-second short video on WeChat Moments. It only consumes the same amount of traffic as a few pictures, but the information it carries is much richer. Vine, a short video sharing app owned by Twitter, can send 6-second looping video messages and track the number of times a video is looped in real time, becoming a new standard for evaluating whether a video is popular. Facebook has also launched similar auto-playing video technology in users' mobile news feed ads. By the way, this technique has also been used recently on Instagram. According to Forrester's research report, on short video social platforms, more brand "fans" will interact with the content released by the brand. For example, as shown in the figure below, Instagram's high proportion of interactive fans benefits from its short video platform Hyperlapse. 

LBS, which was previously promising, has not yet been fully utilized Location-based services (LBS) have long been considered one of the biggest advantages of mobile advertising, but this advantage has been limited so far. Although the term O2O appeared frequently throughout last year, it was rarely used in mobile advertising. On the other hand, it is difficult to grasp the right balance. After all, the platform cannot push an abrupt reminder advertisement to the user’s mobile phone when the user passes by an offline store. It needs a little more subtlety. 

"In the past, LBS was considered an invasive form of advertising, and its appearance was always against the consumers' will," Greg Paull told Curiosity Daily. "For example, when consumers pass by a store or restaurant, they push a commercial message to them, and this message may be of no value to the passers-by. This will push consumers further away." If you still remember, in September 2014, Baidu Maps and McDonald's jointly launched the "Sakura Cone Parkour 0 Yuan Grab" marketing campaign, which is a good example. This activity utilizes Baidu Map LBS big data analysis and push technology. Within a three-kilometer radius, screened users will receive the specific location and navigation information of his attached sakura cone. Customers who enter the coverage area will see a Sakura Ice Cream Cone logo on the screen when they open Baidu Maps or use the "Nearby" or "Search" functions, and then receive a push notification for the "Sakura Ice Cream Cone Parkour 0 Yuan Grab" discount information. Perhaps you have also heard of Apple's iBeacon technology, which transmits data to the user's mobile device through small wireless sensors and low-power Bluetooth technology within a limited area. Based on this technology, Facebook recently launched a new feature called Place Tip on their news feed ads. When you are near a store with a Beacon device installed and refresh your Facebook, you may see nearby business information appear in your news feed, as well as photos and status uploaded by your friends. "Simply using location information is not enough. The principle to remember is to present valuable information to users at the right time," said Greg Paull. Native advertising, with more players A word closely related to information flow advertising is native advertising. This concept, which was born in 2012, refers to content such as articles or videos produced specifically for advertisers, which is more like content itself than traditional advertising. And it can still be searched outside of the advertising buyout period. It first appeared in fashion media and then became popular through popular websites such as Quartz, BuzzFeed, and Vice. Jon Steinberg, president of Buzzfeed, once described it this way: “When you use content in the form of a platform’s version, it’s a native ad. For example, on Twitter, it’s a tweet, on Facebook, it’s a new status, and on Buzzfeed, it’s a news item.” 

Obviously, compared with traditional advertising, native advertising is flexible in form and easier to accept. Currently, almost all information flow ads are native ads. They not only appear on social networking platforms where content is generated by users, but also appear in the media. The New York Times has identified native advertising as one of its important strategies for 2014, and has set up a studio called T Brand specifically to produce native advertising. The Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine followed suit and began producing native advertising content. Because of this, the profits of advertising platforms such as Google and Baidu will be further diverted to media platforms. Native advertising gives other platforms more opportunities to make money. Even if the media does not display banner ads on the page, it can still generate advertising revenue through native advertising. Buzzfeed is a good example. Of course, the potential of search in this field cannot be underestimated. Greg Paull pointed out that "native advertising is becoming more and more popular. At this level, social networks like Facebook are more competitive due to their information flow characteristics. However, traditional digital advertising platforms such as search are still very suitable for native advertising. Google can continue to dominate this field for a long time to come." In his view, in the future, whoever can provide more accurate target audiences, effect measurement tools and auditing capabilities will be closer to victory.

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