The turnout at the recent IAB Mobile event in NYC demonstrated the seriousness with which mobile advertising is being viewed by leading brand agencies.  From my impressions at the show, and reviewing the Twitter stream later, the major themes were “beyond the banner” advertising and mobile advertising effectiveness.

Beyond the Banner
While the dancing dude from the Dockers shakeable ad captured the audience’s attention, an overlying theme of the conference was rich media or beyond-the-banner ads.  In-app and mobile web advertisers are leveraging the power of the smart phone experience to offer ad units like click-to-video, full-page interstitials, location-aware ads, and accelerometer-leveraged ads like the Dockers example. Whether it is the novelty or the interactivity of these ads, it was clear from the presentation, and our experience, that beyond-the-banner campaigns are generating metrics that surpass those of online campaigns.

Mobile Advertising Effectiveness
Another highlight of the panels was Microsoft’s presentation, which shared the results of a recent Dynamic Logic study on mobile advertising effectiveness.  The study showed a 200 percent lift in brand favorability and 140 percent increase in purchase intent.  Medialets also compared the results of an online campaign with an in-app mobile ad campaign and found that online, consumers interacted with the video ad for an average of 12 seconds compared with 42 seconds on mobile.  The Weather Channel, Jumptap, ESPN and others all discussed significant CTRs and conversion metrics on mobile.  

Each of these topics points to the evolving maturity of the mobile advertising market.  ESPN pointed this out best with some fairly strong opinions about the role of premium publishers in selling and delivering these rich mobile campaigns.  Brian Colbert, Director of Mobile Ad Sales for ESPN, felt that mobile has achieved scale and called mobile ad networks premium publishers’ “biggest competition.”  Of course, at Crisp we couldn’t agree more, which is why we collaborate with premium publishers to empower their digital teams to sell mobile and achieve maximum revenues (see our blog post.)

Next up, DigiDay Mobile and ThinkMobile in September.  Going? Send us a tweet and let us know so that we can meet up.