Mobile growing in importance among UK ad agencies

An increased number of UK advertising agencies are regularly including mobile as part of client proposals, but client understanding of the medium continues to be an obstacle, according to a survey by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Growing Adoption of Mobile Advertising

The annual survey, conducted in October 2011, was completed by over 400 agency employees across 23 different agencies, making it the largest of its kind in the UK.

It shows that mobile advertising is being bought less often as an experiment with the study showing a 33pc increase from last year as 28pc of agencies “regularly include mobile as part of client proposals”.

Client Understanding as the Main Barrier

However, 74pc of agencies still feel that client understanding of mobile is the biggest barrier to mobile taking a bigger share of digital spend, making it the largest barrier by far. 

Measurement resurfaced as an issue throughout the survey, as 31pc of respondents revealed they have no idea about the possibilities for campaign measurement.

A new metric that was measured for 2011 was ‘how to plan mobile advertising’ with 32pc admitting they had no idea how to do this.

Lack of Knowledge in Mobile Advertising Planning

The main knowledge gap for agencies is m-commerce, with only 11pc of agencies claim to understand near field communications, and only 8pc understand m-commerce as a whole well.

However, when asked later what the most exciting development for mobile advertising was, NFC came out as one of the top themes. Recent m-commerce research carried out by the IAB showed that 74pc of consumers stated that NFC services would be a good idea.

Sorcha Corcoran