Sunday, September 30, 2012

Investigation: Digital Advertising

In the past few years, there has been a massive boom in the "smartphone" industry.  With the addition of internet, apps, and music available on these smartphones, this enables many doors to be opened in the mobile marketing industry.  Another reason companies are now choosing mobile marketing is because the age group for smartphone owners keeps expanding.  Parents are buying iPhone's for their daughters, and the older people are starting to catch-on with the smartphone trend.  Apps are a very popular source of advertisements because they are easy to download and easy to use.  One example of a company who uses apps for advertising is Lexus.  They targeted the game "Draw Something" in order to try and gain a young adult audience.  This particular game has been downloaded over 50 million times, and that does not include all the times the app is opened, so this just goes to show the type of traffic these advertisements receive.  Also, these particular ads are not like the Youtube ads where you can choose to close out of them.  Instead, they are banners which stay in one place and are not allowed to be closed out of.  This is another advantage and you can read the rest of the article here.  There are more numerous amounts of ways to advertise via "mobile marketing" which I will get to in a second.  Statistics show that these smartphone devices keep getting more and more popular.  Overall access to entertainment content in smartphones increased 82% between 2010 and 2011, and a staggering 42% of mobile users have a smartphone. The rest of the article is here.  The use of "cloud" music technology is also an overwhelming presence on smartphones these days.  "Cloud" music is essentially free for the consumers, however, companies use these apps for advertising use.  Almost every single smartphone user has some type of cloud music app such as Pandora or Spotify.  A study showed that women download twice as much content as men.  This is the type of information these companies need in order to figure out where they want to target their ads.  The rest of the article is here.  I was actually listening to Spotify earlier and one of the ads was a Lady Antebellum ad.  Although some men probably like this band, the majority of their fans are women.  Mobile marketing or television ads? Which is better?  According to some statistical trends, television advertising was up 6.8% in 2011 compared to mobile advertising which rose 60.1%.  Companies are starting to realize the importance of mobile ads.  The rest of the ad can be seen here.  How do consumers/audiences feel about mobile advertising?  Well, there's one thing for sure.  They are a hell of a lot less annoying than television ads.  According to an online publisher's association, 79% of smartphone users have taken action after seeing an ad, which means they bought a product that was advertised.  This goes to show that these mobile ads are doing some sort of good, and audiences do not get near as annoyed as television ads.  The rest of the article can be seen here.

1 comment: