Video leads the way in mobile advertising growth: Report

• Interactive advertising on mobile featuring full screen videos to increase 
• Philippines has highest ratio of video-ad impressions served in the region

A RECENT report by the Mobile Marketing Association, in partnership with advertising platform company Opera Mediaworks, revealed that high demand for video advertisements on mobile led the growth for this segment within the digital advertising industry.
 
The APAC (Asia Pacific) State of Mobile Advertising report showed that the Philippines had the highest ratio of video-ad impressions served in the region (pic below) as a percentage of total impressions. India and Vietnam also exceeded the average across all of Asia.

Speaking to Digital News Asia (DNA), Opera Mediaworks managing director for Asia Vikas Gulati (pic) said, “Video consumption is shooting through the roof,” due in part to publishers creating more video-friendly environments and mobile audiences surpassing TV-like scale.
 
He said the region is predicted to have two billion smartphone users by 2019, and Asia Pacific’s mobile screen minute average is higher than the global average, thanks to the higher demand for mobile video.
 
According to Vikas, the trend now is moving towards interactive advertising, which includes full-screen videos as a key component.
 
“From a format standpoint, the kind of experiences that we are able to deliver on mobile is significantly better – what you’re doing is you’re starting to utilise native applications, you’re integrating with chat, or calls, or the calendar or the map, right within the ad unit itself,” he said.
 
Videos however consume more bandwidth and subsequently mobile data, which can cost a premium in many markets.
 
Vikas said video ads typically take up between 200KB and 300KB of data, which he considered negligible compared with the actual content which consumers are engaged with, be it an online mobile game or a video.

READ ALSO: TubeMogul reports 20% increase in its SEA mobile programmatic markets
 
Moving to the use of mobile websites and apps, Asia trails the global average but both the Philippines and Indonesia exceed the global average for pageviews consumed per user (pic below).

Vietnam, on the other hand, recorded a significantly lower number of pageviews per user, but leads the region in terms of data consumption, with each user in the country using 85MB per month of data, close to the global average of 90MB per month.
 
The report also categorised mobile users into three groups:

• High-frequency users, who access mobile sites and apps five or more days a week;

• Regular users who access mobile sites three or four days a week; and

• Low-volume users who access mobile sites one or two days a week.

The findings showed both Vietnam and Indonesia have a higher percentage of high-frequency users than the global average, while India and the Philippines had more low-frequency users.
 
As for regular frequency users, their share of the market is similar across all countries and also close to the global average.
 
The report noted that smartphone usage in the region continued to grow at a pace on par with the rest of the world, with page-view volume on mobile websites and apps in line with the global average.

In terms of smartphone operating platforms (pic below), the data showed that the Android operating system had a clear No 1 position in market share for impressions served on mobile devices, accounting for more than 60% of traffic in Asia Pacific, and approaching 70% in emerging markets like India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

What about revenue generation? Which content category helped to bring more money to mobile publishers who advertised?
 
The report showed that the business, finance and investing categories of publishers came out winners, grabbing 42% of revenue paid for India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam (pic below).
 
Compare that against categories like social networking, news and games which saw a much higher impression volume but lower revenue.

The research is based on second-quarter 2015 data gleaned from 400 million unique users on the Opera Mediaworks platform, aggregated information from the company’s ad platform and mobile ad exchange servers, and compiled across multiple advertising campaigns.
 
“As a company we’re touching over a billion plus consumers … we’ve got all that data. They are all uniquely identified to their device, and we know about their consumption patterns, what apps they have, what content they are consuming, what their sessions are,” said Vikas.
 
Such information is collected to enhance and target specific segments for all the advertising requested from and delivered by Opera on behalf of various ad networks, as well as direct campaigns created by its customers.
 
When asked if any of this data contained personally identifiable information, Vikas said it was all anonymised.
 
The company also conducted a survey with 260,000 users of the Opera mobile browser in Indonesia, India, the Philippines and Vietnam to better understand their demographics, mobile use behaviour and trends.
 
This insight is then used to help online marketers develop better mobile advertising campaigns for their products.
 
“Collaborating with members of the mobile marketing ecosystem has always been the key to building knowledge and capabilities among this region’s marketers,” Mobile Marketing Association Asia Pacific managing director Rohit Dadwal said in a statement.
 
Going by the latest numbers and his conversations with marketers, Vikas believes the industry has finally warmed up to mobile advertising.
 
And if a company is not already pushing out mobile ads, he said “Advertisers run the risk of making their business obsolete, because consumers have really moved on.”
 
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Philippines the ‘most social nation’ according to Opera
 
 
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