Mobile campaigns are emerging as powerful ad channel for marketers, outperforming online advertising by nearly five times across a variety of metrics, including unaided awareness, message association, and brand favorability, according to a study by InsightExpress.
Benchmarked against performance norms developed for online advertising, mobile campaign norms were also 6.0 times higher than online campaign norms in purchase intent, 3.0 times higher in aided awareness, and 2.5 times higher in ad awareness.
"Online campaigns continue to offer exceptional reach, flexibility, and variety," said Joy Liuzzo, senior director of Marketing & Mobile Research at InsightExpress. "However, the high levels of engagement, the explosion in technical capabilities, low levels of clutter, and the novelty of mobile advertising all likely contribute to increased brand impact."
Below, other findings from the Q4 2009 Mobile InsightNorms study, which analyzed the effectiveness of mobile advertising across media types and verticals.
Mobile Campaigns by Media Type
Among three mobile media types—mobile Internet, SMS, and mobile video—mobile Internet campaigns are the most effective overall:
- Mobile Internet campaigns generated average increases of 9 percentage points (PPs) for unaided awareness, 9 PPs for aided awareness, and 24 PPs for ad awareness.
- SMS campaigns were effective at increasing upper-level purchase funnel metrics such as unaided awareness (up 5 PPs), aided awareness (up 10 PPs), and ad awareness (up 18 PPs).
- Mobile video campaigns drove especially strong results against brand favorability (up 13 PPs) compared with the mobile Internet (up 12 PPs), and SMS (up 7PPs).
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Mobile Campaigns by Vertical
Mobile campaigns generated higher purchase intent than online campaigns across all verticals studied—most significantly in retail (8 times), followed by technology (7 times), travel, (5 times), entertainment (4 times), automotive (4 times), and CPG (3 times):
About the data: Findings are from the Q4 2009 Mobile InsightNorms study, which used norms developed in online ad testing as a benchmark to draw conclusions around the performance of advertising on mobile devices. Those norms were derived from the InsightExpress database containing over 1,000 online ad campaigns and over 100 mobile ad campaigns in the fourth quarter of 2009.
