Mobile Ad Awareness Booms in 2009-10, Purchase Intent Dips

According to the latest numbers from Millennial Media, mobile campaign effectiveness has risen by most metrics in the last three years, while smart phones are more conducive to campaigns than feature phones.

The monthly Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting (S.M.A.R.T.) report for December cites Nielsen numbers indicating 91.8 million U.S. mobile Web users. Millennial Media reached 79 million users in November.

The report also notes that smart phones had an unaided awareness of 17 percent, compared to 13 percent for feature phones. For aided awareness, smart phones had a 7 percent mark, compared to 9 percent for feature phones.

Smart-phone users exhibited a mobile ad awareness of 39 percent, while feature-phone users had a mobile ad awareness of 28 percent. When it came to purchase intent, smart-phone users had a 15 percent response, compared to 12 percent for feature-phone users.

The favorable numbers for smart-phone users is “likely due to larger screen sizes and rich media offerings,” according to Millennial Media.

The company also showed campaign effectiveness for 2007-08, 2008-09 and 2009-10. In the last year, mobile campaigns had an unaided awareness of 10 percent, up from 8 percent in 2008-09 and 8 percent in 2007-08.

Campaigns had an aided awareness of 11 percent in 2009-10, up from 6 percent in the prior period and 8 percent in 2007-08. Mobile ad awareness was 31 percent in 2009-10, up significantly from 14 percent in 2008-09 and 16 percent in 2007-08.

Message association was 20 percent last year, up from 11 percent in 2008-09 and 10 percent in 2007-08. Meanwhile, purchase intent was 13 percent last year, unchanged from 2008-09 and up from 8 percent in 2007-08.

The top advertising vertical in the fourth quarter, ranked by spending, was telecommunications. Retail and restaurants was second, followed by entertainment, finance, automotive, dating, portals and directories, travel, CPG, and education.

“During the holiday season, multiple carrier brands and device manufacturers doubled-down their mobile buys, utilizing a combination of Broad and Targeted Reach strategies to create awareness of new mobile devices, namely Windows Phone 7 devices,” noted Millennial Media regarding telecommunications.

When it came to year-over-year revenue growth, the automotive vertical took the cake with 623 percent growth, followed by retail and restaurants with 572 percent growth, entertainment with 274 percent growth, travel with 249 percent growth, finance with 201 percent growth and education with 127 percent growth.

Traffic to site was the most popular campaign destination in the fourth quarter of 2010 with a 49 percent representation, followed by custom landing page with 35 percent and application download with 16 percent.

Place call was the most popular post-click campaign action with a 30 percent representation in the fourth quarter, followed by submit form with 24 percent, join/subscribe with 23 percent, store locator/view map with 22 percent, and retail promotion with 22 percent.

Social media, which claimed 14 percent of the post-click campaign action mix, had the second-highest growth of 6 percent quarter-over-quarter, according to Millennial Media.

Source:

http://www.millennialmedia.com/wp-content/images/SMART/MillennialMedia-SMART-December-2010.pdf