Mobile and video are where it’s at with online advertising

As media consumption habits change, so must the habits of anyone wanting to be found online change with them. As of 2012, the vast majority of online advertisers in the US are shifting their budgets to mobile and video because this is where most people consume their online media.

This is what the US market looks like across the digital landscape for 2012 :

According to a study by eMarketer; almost half of all US advertisers (49%) planned on boosting their video advertising budgets in 2012; while 65% of those surveyed noted that they would be increasing their mobile ad spend by 65%.

The landscape is beginning to look very different from it did a few years ago when budgets were allocated largely to ad networks and publisher direct placements.

A very interesting statistic to note is the investment in SEM/SEO and how this makes up only a very small allocation of budget among the firms surveyed. SEO/SEM comes in 5th in terms of how the respondents reported their spending split.

Now, knowing that advertisers are going to be tracking users consumption habits; we can then draw the conclusion that advertisers are finding SEO/SEM being less and less effective for driving traffic and converting to leads. At the top of the pile are mobile and social media followed very closely by video.

This certainly does explain why Google is placing so much emphasis on Google+ and social networking cues to affect its search results when you are logged in with your Google account.

Let’s look at video and mobile a little more

This is interesting: the same advertisers above who are not spending the majority of their ad budgets on SEO/SEM when it comes to desktop computing are spending the majority of their mobile budgets on search advertising.

Almost half (49%) of all mobile spend is being devoted to search. The next highest in terms of spend is banners and rich media advertising. This trend is reported to be the norm for at least the foreseeable future with this eMarketer survey taking us all the way through to 2016.

But typically what are the mobile and video ads being used for?
According to the same survey, mobile ads are going to be measured and purposed for brand engagement. 68% of the respondents said that they were using their mobile ads for brand engagement while 54% said that they were going to use their video ads for brand engagement.

Following closely behind was “traffic driving” or “clickthrough rate” with 64% and 63% being used by mobile and video respectively.

No matter which way you slice it though, video and mobile advertising are going to become more and more prominent as advertising platforms because users are all naturally gravitating to these platforms.

This is either born out of our seemingly new need to be “always on” or a byproduct of the fact that through technological innovation, the world is simply getting smaller and faster so people are demanding more from their information sources. If it’s the latter, it certainly makes them rich hunting grounds.