Mobile ad spend up 190%: Why NZ marketers are finally embracing mobile as a credible platform

By Sarah Kavanagh

New Zealand marketers are finally beginning to embrace mobile as a credible platform. Mobile ad spend in 2013 is up 190% as more and more NZ brands and advertisers mobilise their content and add interactivity to traditional media.  What’s more, mobile ad formats are moving beyond the banner to offer creative content and tools to communicate with audiences.

As the only medium offering always on, always in reach connectivity, mobile is touted to soon eclipse TV as the first screen. But while that’s a few moments away, how are our marketers embracing mobile now?

To begin with we’re seeing a shift away from big brand advertisers running ‘blind’ banner campaigns over a myriad of ad networks. With thousands of apps and m-sites, it was simply a numbers game before a big brand was caught in an environment with questionable content. Would this happen in print? Would this happen on TV? Environment plus context have always been the two essentials to create successful media placement. 

This is where mobile’s early rush to put brand advertisers in a performance space, where clicks and price alone were the only determinants, caused major concerns for brands. Recognizing when to tap into the benefits of performance networks is key to success and our view has always been performance has a role for response driven advertisers, not big brands where image and association are critical to success.

To me marketers’ use of performance networks for their big brand campaigns was a simply case of not understanding there is another way. But now, as mobile comes of age in New Zealand, our brand managers increasingly want to know where each and every ad is being placed. Long lists of mobile publishers no-one has ever heard of no longer cut it. Advertisers are increasingly questioning if they’re in safe environments. By ‘safe’ I mean their premium brand is positioned alongside content of equal quality, targeted to appropriate audiences with environmental relevance. It’s been a learning curve for many an advertiser, but it is good news for our industry that the fundamentals of traditional advertising are finally being applied to mobile.

As this shift slowly takes place to contextually relevant content, mobile marketing is truly coming into its own. Premium environments often have the added benefit of enabling rich media ad units, key to driving higher levels of interaction with the target audience. By utilising the native functionality of smartphones, such as the calendar sync feature, brands can communicate with the consumer long after they’ve interacted with the ad. And creative, tailored content produces campaigns that perform better. Not just via more ‘clicks’ but through deeper brand engagement. Just like the basic mechanics of traditional advertising.

Increasingly marketers and agencies are considering the role mobile can play alongside traditional media and are planning interactivity at the campaign outset. Mobile’s ability to bolt on and offer instant interactive audience engagement was recently a key component in NZ’s first mobile-led consumer sampling campaign for Bayer’s vitamin and mineral supplement, Berocca.

The campaign was designed to exploit the nativity functionality of the iphone. It commenced with animated banners across Mobile Embrace’s network of premium m-sites and apps and top New Zealand m-sites for the New Zealand Herald, the Radio Network and TVNZ. Once clicked the user was directed to a dedicated campaign landing page and offered a link to sync a series of 28 daily calendar entries to their iphone. Each day at 8.48am the user was offered a ‘BeroccaScope’ – quirky and humorous mantra to guide their day. On day three of the calendar sync, consumers could register to receive a free pack of Berocca.

This type of interactivity and many other mobile led audience engagement techniques can be added to any traditional media campaign. By incorporating mobile as part of the overall marketing mix, mobile can deliver target audience impact, involvement and response in an instant.

The future for mobile in NZ is certainly bright. Not only are more and more brands embracing mobile, they are doing so in an increasingly creative and considered way. After all, mobile can be more than just a platform housing banner ads and generating cheap cost per clicks.

Sarah Kavanagh is New Zealand’s National Sales Manager of 4th Screen Advertising at Mobile Embrace – New Zealand’s largest premium mobile advertising network.