By now, most marketers understand that mobile marketing and advertising is a business imperative.
With consumers on their mobile devices for about five hours each and every day, ignoring mobile as a marketing channel would be well…ignorant. Along with the growth in popularity of mobile, there have also been many advances in the mobile marketing and advertising space. These innovations make mobile even more effective than it’s been in
the past, and marketers are taking notice. Here are three reasons mobile is even hotter this year than it’s been in the past:

New Ad Formats
Snapchat and Instagram are both sweethearts of mobile users already. The two, along with more established Facebook, introduced new ad formats this past year that promise to broaden interest in mobile advertising. All three new formats offer a larger and more flexible canvas brands to tell their stories on the mobile screen. As Eric Franchi noted in The Drum, “these new ad formats, from three of the biggest social platforms, could solve a nagging problem for many brands. Not only do they offer the opportunity to create beautiful, engaging advertisements, they also offer incredible reach and targeting.”
The introduction of these new ad formats may encourage brands to invest more in mobile. They recognize the fact that brands simply need more real estate to get their message across in a persuasive way. They also pave the way for new standard formats that could be sold programmatically, therefore improving both reach and scale.

More App Usage; Better In-App Ads
Of all that time spent on mobile, a solid80 percent or more is spent in apps. That’s nets out to literally hours each day! In-app advertising used to equate to tiny banners along the bottom of the app screen,but the channel has come into its own in recent years. In-app ads today may be full screen, video,interactive – the possibilities have become endless.
There are many other advantages to in-app advertising versus standard mobile display. For starters,location tracking is generally more accurate as app users typically grant app developers permission to track their location upon installation. (Mobile web users have to re-affirm consent every time they start a new browser session, so they’re less likely to grant permission.) Apps also offer better targeting options, particularly with SDKs. With more detailed data sets, advertisers can gain a deeper
understanding of user behaviors, including other apps the mobile user accesses. Finally, attribution isalso easer with in-app advertising for the same reasons.

Mobile Programmatic is Taking Off
Programmatic advertising has been all the rage over the last five years in display advertising. The practices of automating data-driven ad buying and selling has meant that advertisers can reach and engage very specific audiences online. It takes away the old process of buying media from specific publishers or sites, and instead empowers advertisers to buy audiences – groups of consumers who
meet a specific profile – anytime, anywhere. Programmatic has expanded to encompass mobile advertising in recent years, and in 2017, it’s really taking off. This growth in the trend can be attributed to a few factors: first, location data has become
more accessible – and better than ever. Not only can marketers target audiences by location in real time, they can use historical location data to learn more about how their target customers live, work and play. Secondly, the ever-increasing number of smartphones and the many hours people spend on them make the volume and reach of ads more important than ever, and programmatic is the most efficient way to ensure both volume and reach. Third and finally, improved ad formats (as mentioned
previously) make mobile more desirable for advertisers than ever. Not only can they reach customers on mobile at a scale they hadn’t imagined before, they can engage them with creatives that weren’t possible even a year ago.

2017 is the year that mobile programmatic has come of age, and it’s truly changing everything. If these three trends aren’t enough to get you thinking hard about your mobile investment this year, read this article again. Also consider this: mobile phone penetration and app usage are only growing.
Phones get bigger, better, faster and more affordable. If you’ve been holding back on mobile, it’s time tochange that behavior. It’s easy enough to test mobile at any budget, and your almost guaranteed to see
a return on your investment.