Mobile ad snaps up 2nd spot globally, Malaysia key in APAC

Mobile has emerged as the second largest advertising medium by spend with the anticipated year-on-year growth rate of 35.2% helping it overtake the desktop internet for the first time.

WARC, the international authority on advertising and media effectiveness, cites mobile’s ad-spend across all formats to amount to $98.3bn in 2017, representing 23% of the world-wide spend.

Malaysia, with its fastest growing mobile market, is the prime driver in the mobile ad revenue of the Asia Pacific region.

A Statista report claims digital advertising in Malaysia will amount to US $317m in 2017 and US$171m of total revenue will be generated through mobile in 2021.

Several e-commerce based businesses like Lazada, MySale, 11th Street in Malaysia are riding the mobile advertising wave.

Not just Malaysia, but the proliferation of smartphones and the always-on, mobile-culture is becoming all-pervasive worldwide.

The latest WARC release Global Ad trends presents latest insights and evidenced-thinking from the global advertising industry.

Focusing on mobile, this Report includes key findings from 12 key markets, viz. Australia, Brazil. China, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom and United States-which between them account for approximately two-thirds of the value of global ad trade.

According this WARC report, 51% of total mobile advertising expenditure for 2017, would be allocated to search. Display formats will account for 45% and classified and other spend 4%.

TV is expected to remain the world’s largest ad medium by spend this year and next, at around $139bn.

Social networking accounts for over a third of daily online time via all devices. Mobile’s share of Facebook’s ad revenue is expected to equate to 88% ($34bn) for 2017, up 5 percentage points from 2016.

James McDonald, Data Editor, WARC, says: “Daily mobile time has more than doubled over the last five years – from 1hr 17mins in 2012 to 3hrs 2mins in 2017 – and our research demonstrates how marketers are looking to capitalize on this by investing more in social, video and native mobile formats over the coming years. Much of this influx has been to the benefit of the duopoly – Facebook and Google – where one in four dollars of global advertising is now spent.”