A lot of the information regarding mobile marketing is up and down, with some saying good and others saying bad. So, to avoid the confusion that these swaying opinions tend to cause, let’s look at the facts. By that I mean, let’s look at the recently released revenue figures by the Interactive Advertising Bureau in collaboration with Pricewaterhouse Coopers. According to their findings, mobile advertising overall has grown 95% in the past year, from the first half of 2011 to the first half of 2012. For the mobile ad industry, this still means that they only account for $1.2 billion in revenues, but the increase is still substantial. Of course, the mobile ad industry was not the only one covered in the report from the IAB and Pricewaterhouse Coopers.
The report tells us that the entire industry of digital and interactive marketing and advertising has grown to a historic record high of $17 billion during the first half of this year. This represents a 14% increase from last year’s results. Something that marketers can get particular excited about, considering the rapidly growing number of marketers using the medium, is the growth that was seen in digital video marketing, a newly successful branch of display advertising. Digital video rose 18% in the duration to just over $1 billion in revenue. Therefore, it seems that the success that most people have been seeing with digital video has grown and is becoming more common.
Here are some of the more important highlights from the report:
- Mobile generated significant growth – almost doubling year-over-year – up 95 percent to $1.2 billion in half-year 2012 from $636 million in the comparable 2011 period
- Digital video, a component of display-related advertising, saw an increase of 18 percent year-over-year, bringing in a little over $1 billion in revenue in the first two quarters of 2012 compared to nearly $900 million in the first six months of 2011
- Search revenues in the first half of the year totaled $8.1 billion, up 19 percent from nearly $6.8 billion during the same timeframe in 2011
- Display-related advertising revenues in the first half of the year totaled almost $5.6 billion, accounting for 33 percent of 2012 half-year revenues, up 4 percent from $5.3 billion in the first half of 2011
- Retail advertisers constitute the largest category of internet ad spending for the first half of this year, claiming 20 percent of the total revenues at $3.4 billion, while Automotive brought in $2.2 billion for first-half 2012, marking an uptick to 13 percent versus 11 percent of category spend reported for half-year 2011 at $1.7 billion
The report shows us that there has been a significant and overall growth in the entire industry of digital and interactive marketing. There have been many that have worried lately about their choices of where to spend their ad dollars, seeing many statistics that have shown a decrease in certain digital marketing platforms. This report however, has shown that digital marketing is on the up and has reached a record high.
