Just Playin
Two in three U.S. consumers would surrender social media apps or TV for mobile games. According to a March 2019 survey from mobile ad and app monetization company Tapjoy, 69% of consumers said they would rather give up social media apps or TV than lose their favorite mobile games. And they don’t mind being served ads while they play.
+ Members of this dedicated gaming cohort are important because they’re paying attention (and even appreciate) the in-game ads they receive. Consumers were more than twice as likely to pay attention to advertisements placed in mobile games (41%) than ads place on the internet (17%), in magazines (15%) or on billboards (15%), according to Tapjoy. 76% of U.S. mobile gamers surveyed prefer opt-in rewarded ads, compared with 24% that prefer obligatory ads. This preference is shared across demographics—three-quarters of U.S. Millennials said they’d take opt-in rewarded ads over interstitial, and 67% of U.S. parents said they would likely engage with a video ad in exchange for a reward.
Podential
The podcast industry is packed with advertising potential. Marketers spent $479 million on podcast ads in 2018, and podcast advertising revenues are projected to surpass $1 billion by 2021, according to Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC projections.
+ In an analysis of the U.S. podcast advertising industry, IAB and PwC calculated self-reported podcast advertising revenues from 22 companies and found that revenues grew 34% in 2018, compared with the $257.4 million in self-reported revenues in 2017. The IAB and PwC predict that revenues will grow 42% this year.
+ About 76.4 million people in the U.S. will tune in to podcasts this year, and most weekly listeners will imbibe multiple times a week. Edison Research released research in March 2019 with Triton Digital that found a fifth (21%) of podcast listeners said they listened to four to five podcasts a week, and even more (31%) said they listened to six or more podcasts a week. There’s a podcast for nearly every consumer segment, so marketers should have little difficulty finding podcast prospects.
Explore
While Instagram’s new Explore page ads will likely boost opportunities for marketers, organic reach will suffer. Keen marketers have used best practices to get their content featured on Explore, but when ads are introduced, it could become more challenging to appear there organically.
+ Instagram announced late second quarter plans to place ads on Explore, the discovery page where users are fed curated content according to their interests and can enjoy content from accounts they don’t follow. This is the first meaningful expansion of ad placements beyond Stories and the traditional feed. This may be because Facebook is starting to lean more heavily on Instagram for ad revenue.
