Dynamic Logic, a Millward Brown research company, has announced the aggregate results of mobile branding research studies for an early look at mobile advertising performance. The company has completed over 30 AdIndex for Mobile research studies in the US and the UK to measure the branding effects of mobile advertising campaigns across a number of industry sectors, including alcohol, automotive, consumer electronics, FMCG, entertainment, financial services, retail, telecommunications, and travel. The campaigns included display ads on mobile WAP sites and downloadable mobile applications.
Comparing people exposed to the mobile campaigns to those not exposed, the initial performance averages from 21 studies suggest that mobile advertising can be an effective medium for raising top and bottom funnel brand metrics. An average increase of +23.9 percentage points in Mobile Ad Awareness shows that these campaigns generally cut through and grab users' attention. Average increases in Brand Favourability and Purchase Intent of +5.4 and +4.7 percentage points, respectively, support the ability of mobile advertising to change consumers' attitudes towards a brand and to drive intent to purchase.
Part of the reason for these positive increases may be a result of the newness of the medium, says Dynamic Logic. People may be intrigued by advertising they see on their mobile phone, which is displayed on a smaller screen and in a less cluttered environment compared to the Internet, so they may tend to pay more attention to it. More research and campaign analysis is needed to help marketers understand what will continue to work best on mobile devices.
"Planning a campaign around new media is challenging and research continues to become more important," says Caroline Jones, director of Starcom MediaVest Plus. "While this initial research is a great start, we need to continue to share our learnings from mobile marketing campaigns so these early averages can expand into a valuable benchmarking resource going forward."
"While these results are only based on a small number of campaigns and should be used as directional increases, we realise it is important for our clients to begin comparing their mobile campaign's effectiveness to an industry average," says Angela Whitelaw, director of client services, Dynamic Logic. "As we measure more campaigns, we will continue to build these averages into a normative database that can be used to help marketers understand what's working and what's not on mobile. Ultimately, we'd like to have norms that can be used for mobile campaigns in the same way our MarketNorms database is used for online performance benchmarking and planning."
"Having initial averages to compare our clients' campaigns' performance will serve as a guideline to what's working and what's not in these early stages of the medium," says David Fieldhouse, mobile manager, MediaCom. "It's exciting to see this normative information around mobile's impact on branding become available, as it offers our clients some insight on how to best use mobile."