A report last year by On Device Research states that South Africa’s mobile penetration rate is now a staggering 133%. ‘Staggering’ is no exaggeration if one remembers that just two decades ago, in 1993, the country had but 4 million landlines, and was just about to roll out its first cellular base station. Twenty years later, we’ve hit the 60 million mobile phone mark.
For marketers, the relevance is that along with 60 million South African cellphones comes the fact that advertising rands are better spent when they target mobile screens. Some 63 percent of South Africans, Kenyans and Nigerians say that the mobile Internet has ‘greatly improved’ their lives – no doubt because it has greatly improved their ability to make informed purchasing decisions.
Now that it’s clear that the number one mobile marketing trend is ever-increasing opportunities thanks to ever-upwards mobile phone sales, we took a look at what leading opinion-makers say are three more specific mobile advertising trends that we can expect during the latter half of 2015. We looked at VentureBeat, Matomy Media, Target Marketing and CNBC for certain common threads and this is what we came up with:
With growing mobile impressions, there’s an increase in demand for better and richer measures of ROI. Advertisers are looking for more meaningful interaction and will therefore want to see more cost-per-acquisition (CPA) campaigns. Essentially, we’re likely to see mobile advertisers focusing increasingly on performance.
As users start demanding more interactivity, and marketers realise that video formats are highly effective in engaging users and delivering stronger brand stories, video will become ever more essential. Allied with this is the need for marketers to engage with full-function specialist mobile advertising talent that can design more than just one-dimensional adverts.
In-app adverts will continue to overpower the mobile web as users spend significantly more time in apps than they do on the mobile web. Marketers should be prepared for bigger in-app budgets in the near term as mobile users feel comfortable engaging in a sort of ‘app-based cocooning’.
The implication of all of the above is that marketers need to partner with a mobile advertising outfit that has its sights set firmly on the future horizon in order to accurately spot trends that will deliver more bang per buck.
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