While mobile is hardly new, it was not until last year that the advertising industry was officially required to adopt a brand new marketing medium – Mobile Advertising. It barreled onto the scene, took center stage, and quickly cemented itself as the marketing medium of the future. The mobile industry had plenty to celebrate in 2012 as the fabled “Year of Mobile” had finally arrived but its arrival also caused disruption, particularly for online publishers.
During a period when online publishers were already improvising monetization efforts to compensate for the rise of programmatic buying, mobile introduced yet another variable that would further complicate the situation, forcing a shift in focus. Already squeezing every last cent out of online CPM’s, mobile traffic immediately made its presence felt as online audiences were no longer restricted to a computer screen as a means of accessing their favorite digital content. As a result, mobile traffic began cannibalizing impressions from the desktop impressions, further impacting an already depleting bottom line. Digital publishers reliant on online advertising revenue were suddenly dealt with a brand new form of supply to figure out and monetize immediately, or face a slow death at the expense of mobile's rapid growth.
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Tagged 'mobile marketing' 
The Danger of Dependency
The Android Device ID has bugs. This shouldn’t come as news to anyone but the problem is widespread and causes the Device ID to be an unreliable identifier. Research conducted in August 2012 found there were 3,997 discreet Android device types and there is no reliable way to recognize audiences on any of them. This is a huge issue for app developers and publishers. All major manufacturers are impacted and Google is not offering any solutions to the problem.
Just look at what the Google Dev Team has to say about this issue:
“Device manufacturers are welcome to backport the change if they wish. However, Android 2.2 is final as far as our codebase is concerned — with the exception of critical bugs, we can’t really make changes to it. Regardless, there’s nothing that can be done to fix this on affected devices without an OTA, which is again up to device manufacturers.”
There is a better approach for the mobile advertising industry – Universal Device Recognition. This approach does not depend on a device-provided identifier like the Android Device ID, does not leave any permanent identifiers on the device and works across all devices all the time.
The advertising industry has gotten a glimpse into... Read more
5 Mobile Trends for 2013 (Projection Alert!)
At the end of every year, there is no shortage of projections -- especially in the advertising industry. Analysts, bloggers and even internal teams try to predict "what's next", in order to better plan and budget for the coming year.
But often the best way to understand what's around the corner is to take a peek back at where you came from, what direction you're going, and how fast you're traveling.
Last week our parent company, Opera Software, released a report that does just that. It looks back on the biggest moments and trends from the year, leveraging the data from its mobile ad platform of 10,000 sites and apps which serves 40 billion impressions a month. So we're not talking about a casual, subjective glance; this is a deep dive into what actually happened in the last 12 months.
Several of these trends are no doubt going to continue in 2013, and likely build even more momentum:
iPhone and iOS will enjoy the view from the top
The Samsung Galaxy III is definitely a huge hit among many -- about 30 million have sold since it's mid-year launch. But the iPhone 5, which launched about four months later, now accounts for 16.1% of all... Read more
