Read Screen Digest's Report on mobile media advertising opportunities to further understand the market for advertising in TV, video and games that exists today globally.

Executive summary

Key Findings

- Personal, always on, interactive and engaging, mobile enjoys a significantly higher market penetration than fixed internet. In emerging markets the mobile phone, rather than the PC, is the primary connected device. These factors give mobile significant opportunities for advertising.

- In a very dynamic industry consolidation period, the three companies most active in pursuing vertical integration in mobile advertising are Google, Nokia and Microsoft.

- Operators are actively developing services that can provide competing solutions and are expected to increase collaboration to offer market-wide advertising inventory.

- The majority (87 per cent) of advertising agencies do not use mobile advertising yet. Promotional content is still favoured over rich media ad embedding, partly because mobile advertising is still considered at an experimental stage.

- Of the agencies which had already trialled mobile advertising, SMS was the most popular method of reaching consumers and 92 per cent of the agencies had used messaging in a mobile campaign. 75 per cent had used at least once mobile content as a promotional item, while 67 per cent had at least once placed an ad in mobile content (audiovisual or games).

- Interactivity, location technologies and fine targeting opportunities are seen as the biggest advantages of mobile as an advertising medium.

- Data pricing transparency and structure, handset and mobile web usability, content quality as well as the lack of standardised and comparable audience metrics are the principal hurdles for reaching users critical mass and achieving mobile advertising take-off.

- Mobile advertising and marketing is expected to be increasingly integrated with other media such as outdoor, print and TV for improved interaction. Mobile and web offer further synergy opportunities in the planning, management and measurement tools of the digital inventory.