Native Mobile Advertisers show Broad Enthusiasm for the Format

Native advertising may still be a format brands and publishers are experimenting with, but that doesn’t mean they are slowing down rollouts of native content. Nearly half of US ad professionals surveyed by Sharethrough in August 2013 said they had used sponsored posts for online-only content distribution. Sponsored posts are one of the primary forms native ads can take.

Not only have native ad campaigns caught on online, they have also moved to mobile, with more than one-quarter of mobile advertisers reporting that they had purchased native mobile ads.

And mobile marketers are bullish—to the say the least—about the effectiveness of native mobile ads for branding campaigns. Nearly all respondents reported that native ads were very or somewhat effective at achieving these goals.

However, branding was not the exclusive purpose of native mobile ads. The lead marketing objective of native mobile ads was actually awareness, cited by 84.4% of respondents. That was followed by branding and brand affinity, both upper-funnel goals, and both cited by more than half of respondents. Purchase intent was also considered a native mobile marketing objective by 33.8% of respondents.

eMarketer estimates that US advertisers will spend $1.88 billion on digital sponsorships this year, and by 2017, that figure will reach $3.08 billion. With the growing shift of social network ad revenues to mobile, a rising share of this digital sponsorship spending will undoubtedly go to mobile.

Courtesy of eMarketer