Mobile ads move towards rich media

Warc, 19 June 2014

BOSTON: High-value ad formats are taking an increasing share of the mobile advertising market, as their greater effectiveness reduces interest in static banner ads, research has shown.

According to Nexage, the mobile advertising exchange, interstitial, rich media, and video ad formats currently account for 35% of its total inventory but are set to take at least half by next year.

In evidence it cited the growth rates it was seeing for these formats: requests for video ads were up 516% over the year, while for rich media there had been a 346% rise and for interstitials 194%.

In parallel with the growing number of requests, the number of video ads delivered was up 404%, rich media up 216% and interstitials up 178%.

"There is a major creative mix shift underway in mobile advertising, as high-value rich media, video, and native ad formats take more and more share of the market," Victor Milligan, Nexage CMO, told Warc, adding that this development had a "direct and significant impact on the value publishers can gain from mobile, the ability of advertisers to showcase their brands to an increasingly mobile consumer."

This was leading to a "powerful virtuous cycle where investments by publishers are met with investments by media buyers and so on". Accordingly, he expected that growth rates for supply and demand would "accelerate such that rich media, video, and native will be the majority ad formats sold by next year."

Nexage also cited research from Celtra, a specialist in cross-screen HTML5 technology for advertising, which looked at the performance of different mobile display ad formats across campaigns served in Q1 2014.

It found that rich media, or expandable banners, outperformed static banners by a factor of 26 on engagement rates. For interstitials, the figure was a more modest, but still impressive, eight times greater engagement.

This pattern was repeated on other metrics, with click-through rates nine times higher for rich media and eight times for interstitials, and video play rates 8.5 times higher for rich media and twice as high for interstitials.

Data sourced from Nexage; additional content by Warc staff