Dive Brief:
- Zenith’s Advertising Expenditure Forecast found that global spending on mobile advertising will overtake desktop in 2017, according to a press release.
- The report revised its forecast upward for mobile ad growth from 46% to 48% in 2016. ZenithOptimedia expects mobile to make up 60% of all online advertising by 2018.
- “Mobile advertising is growing even faster than we’ve predicted," Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at ZenithOptimedia, told Ad Exchanger. "It’s leading to one of the most rapid changes and shifts in advertising spend allocation we’ve seen.”
Dive Insight:
The updated advertising forecast from ZenithOptimedia shows how fast mobile is growing — and how quickly it's eating into desktop. The latest projections show that the shift to mobile is happening faster than expected.
Consumers are spending more and more time on their mobile devices, and a lot of that time spent is happening within smartphone apps. A recent report from comScore found that smartphone apps command 50% of time spent on digital media, eclipsing other channels such as desktop (32%), tablet apps (9%), the web on smartphones (7%), and the web on tablets (2%). The ad spending trendline in ZenithOptimedia's forecast mirrors the way in which consumers are shifting their attention from desktop to mobile.
The biggest internet advertising companies are also seeing this shift to mobile: Facebook now gets 84% of its ad revenue from mobile, while Google now serves more search results on mobile than on desktop.
