Mobile ad spend to quadruple in the next five years

ABI Research has estimated that amount spent on mobile display advertising will quadruple over the next five years, the more cynical will say yes it’s going to quadruple from £1 to £4, but any rise is good especially in the current economic client.

The actual figures for the current mobile ad spend in the US – unfortunately there are no figures for the UK – is not £1 but £206 million ($313 million), and it’s set to rise to £790 million ($1.2 billion) by 2015.

ABI Research practice director Neil Strother says, “A survey conducted by ABI Research in February found that 28% of the mobile subscribers queried accessed the mobile Internet daily. This is a huge increase over the number doing so just 14 months ago, and is a powerful driver for the mobile marketing and advertising market.”

ABI cites smartphone usage as the primary driver of the ad spend increase – smartphone penetration in the US currently stands at about 20% which is on par with what it is in the UK – “Marketers have increasingly been shifting budgets into mobile campaigns,” Strother reports. “This became evident during our research interviews with advertising agency executives, technology vendors and mobile ad network operators, who said they have been seeing year-over-year increases of 25% to 30% in campaign spending.”

According to ABI another contributing factor is the big technology firms now getting involved in mobile, as demonstrated by Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless and Google’s takeover of AdMob. But independent ad networks are also serving this market, companies such as Millennial Media, Jumptap, and Greystripe. “Each of these networks is focused on a somewhat different part of the market,” says Strother, “but in principal they’re open to anybody with money who wants to reach a mobile audience.”