As a growing number of consumers look to smartphones and tablets advertisers will soon spend as much on computing devices as TV.
According to the results of recent study conducted by the media research unit of Interpublic Group of Cos, Magna Global, mobile marketing is going to be an important driver of spending on digital advertising.
This will cause spending over digital channels to rise by 15 percent, by the end of next year.
Social media campaigns and mobile marketing will also send this spending even higher, to the point that it will equal the spending on television by the year 2019. The research predicted that by the end of next year, the amount of money spent on digital advertising will reach $163 billion. That will be a 30 percent portion of the total ad spending over all channels. Magna Global also said that in a matter of four years from now, digital ad spending will represent 38 percent of the global ad outlay total, which will be a proportion that is just as large as television, which has held the largest ad spending share for over ten years.
This mobile marketing trend prediction is a reflection of the shift toward smartphone use by consumers.
Many consumers are now spending a great deal more time looking at the screens of their smartphones than they are looking at their televisions. This, according to the executive director of global forecasting at Magna Global, Vincent Letang. The prediction for 2014, says Letang, will be that there will be a mobile ad spending rise of 72 percent.
He added that “This year, next year, if you do the math, almost all the growth is from mobile,” and that “Especially in the home, for casual users and for entertainment purposes, tablets and smartphones are making great progress.”
Comparatively, Magna Global predicted that ad spending over TV should rise by 3 percent in 2015, and will rise by another 6 percent in 2016. While this is a healthy growth, it is clearly nowhere near the increases that are being seen by the digital and mobile marketing spheres. Television has been the top ad spending channel since 1999, when it overtook newspapers for that lead position. Now that smartphones and tablets have consumers looking to their smaller screens on a regular basis, mobile ad spending over those channels has taken off.
