Mobile marketing: four emerging trends

1. Summary

Ever-increasing smartphone penetration and surging consumption of mobile data have finally helped the mobile advertising industry make a long-overdue move forward. And as the market evolves, innovative new technologies and strategies are emerging to help marketers deliver the right ads to the most appropriate users at the optimal time and place. Beacons, cross-device marketing, real-time bidding, and native ads have gained a tremendous amount of traction in the past year, and advertisers, publishers and developers should learn how to best leverage them.

Key findings from this report include:

• Retailers are scrambling to deploy beacons to communicate with customers as they stroll through stores, but the market will endure some growing pains over the next two years as consumers decide what kind of messages they’ll accept as they shop.
• Cross-device marketing holds enormous promise for companies that can easily track their users as they move between PCs, smartphones and tablets. Companies that don’t have that luxury must depend on less-certain methods to identify users across platforms.
• Real-time bidding and native ad formats have gained substantial traction over the last year, but both should be considered components of a comprehensive advertising strategy rather than stand-alone “solutions.”
• Native ads are particularly well-suited to mobile form factors and should be considered an important complement to traditional mobile ad strategies.