Earlier this month ZenithOptimedia announced that mobile advertising will overtake newspaper advertising next year, accounting for 12.4% of global adspend while newspapers will account for 11.9%.
The cry from newspapers was quick and loud, with Denise Turner, insight director at Newsworks, pointing out that Zenith’s report “only refers to newspapers in their print format, without taking into account the fact that they are now multi-platform newsbrands which exist across mobiles, tablets and online as well.”
Turner wanted the world to acknowledge that some of the advertising spend that is being attributed to mobile in the report will have been around newsbrand content.
“It seems strange to pit mobile against newspapers, when newspapers are part of mobile,” she said.
It was a fair point, and at the Future of National Newspapers conference on Wednesday, Nick Hewat, commercial director, Guardian News and Media, talked of the “brilliant” Guardian mobile app as a “prestigious environment for a great mobile experience.”
Newsbrands, Hewat pointed out, had successfully found a way to effectively publish in a tech-driven, multi-platform world and had invested a lot of cash to ensure the experience was a good one for readers.
Yet there is a problem: advertisers are not interested.
“Mobile is hard,” Hewat said. “It’s a pain in the arse.”
The Guardian’s mobile app gets around a million people a month accessing it. That is around 2% of the Guardian’s monthly audience but roughly a quarter of its page views. That means, Hewat argued, mobile readers are the most “loyal and engaged audience we have…yet I can’t find the bugger who wants to buy it.”
For a buyer like Adam Pace, deputy managing director, Opera, the media investment arm of Omnicom Media Group, there are a number of issues holding advertisers and agencies back – not least the small screen size, problems of scale, price and technology.
“The promise of mobile and the reality of mobile are quite a long way apart,” he said.
“I feel it’s something you talk a lot more about than actually do and I struggle to see how it’s better than advertising on TV or in a newspaper.”
Publishers might want to find a solution quick, however, given that mobile advertising remains the driving force behind the growth of the entire advertising market, contributing 83% of all new ad dollars between 2014 and 2017.
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