Study reveals mobile advertising will double by 2019

Businesses that had not yet included mobile advertising as a substantial part of their marketing strategy need to seriously think about transitioning to a new emerging order, as new research showed advertising spending was shifting in a big way.

A new study by Juniper Research, Digital Advertising: Online, Mobile & Wearables 2015-2019, projects annual global advertising spend on mobile devices would reach $105 billion by 2019, up from about $51 billion this year.

''The research suggests that this increase in advertising spend is in large part attributable to an attitude shift amongst brands and retailers who now use mobile as a core channel for consumer engagement,'' said Juniper, in the report.

''It argues that the ability of smartphones to deliver targeted, personalised and timely advertising – allied to the media-stacking trends amongst consumers – means that mobile advertising offers both high visibility and high response rates.''

While marketers were following consumers to their smartphones, they would also need to tread carefully. With more and more information about consumers becoming available, marketers eager to use ''big data'' analytics to gain insight into consumer behaviour, according to the research consumers were increasingly concerned about privacy and how their personal information was being used.

Mobile data traffic would approach almost 197,000 PB (Petabytes) by 2019, equivalent to over 10 billion Blu-ray movies, new research from Juniper Research showed.

However, according to the research, only 41 per cent of the data generated by these devices would be carried over cellular networks by 2019, with the majority of mobile data traffic offloaded to Wi-Fi networks.

According to the research, the average monthly data usage by smartphone and tablet users would double over the next four years. The daily media consumption by mobile users would continue to increase, bolstered by the rise in 4G adoption and factors such as HD video usage.

''Certainly, video is forming an ever-greater proportion of network traffic. For example, Juniper Research anticipates that video traffic over smartphones will increase by nearly 8 times between 2014 and 2019'', explains research author Nitin Bhas.

Video currently accounted for close to 60 per cent of global IP traffic and in a number of developed markets the proportion was likely to exceed 70 per cent in two to three years.