History of mobile ads

The history of mobile advertising

Despite mobile advertising a new technology for advertisers, believe or not, but the first iPhone was released less than ten years ago (in 2007), mobile advertising seems to be much longer is the important part of our life. This is due to not just the lighting fast pace of advertising solutions in general, but the incredible development of advertising technology, the serving and supporting technologies, platforms etc. behind advertising solutions.

If it is already it is difficult to be updated with ever changing mobile marketing and advertising trends, than why would be interesting to know the history and evolution of mobile advertising. But seeing it from a higher perspective, it could be beneficial for all mobile marketing professional to know the history of mobile ads, and understand what makes it such important and effective part of a marketing plan.

So let’s take a short time travel back in time, not just so far, but just until the turning point to the millennium.

The first mobile ad

The first mobile ad was shared via SMS in Finland at 1997, when a finish news provider sent news headlines via SMS. The innovation is Short Messages Services (SMS) helped advertisers to understand that this communication channel is not just about in people to people communication, but a great opportunity to deliver brand messages also. Shortly Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) a global non-profit professional association was founded.

SMS has became mass media channel

Just a few years after, at the beginning of the decade, the time sensitiveness and the opportunity of location-based commercial messaging boosted SMS to the seventh mass media channel, as mobile marketer and advertising professional called. Companies started to use SMS to send exclusive promotions and user loyalty offers. The significant success of SMS led to developments in mobile technologies, for example smartphones not just created for on-the-web browsing abilities, but also for advertisers to capture user attention even when surfing on the net, playing with games or taking selfies. The first mobile advertising companies, like Admob and Millennial Media were founded.

Smartphones getting really smarter

So at was mentioned at the beginning of this post, the release of the first iPhone at 2007, was a game changing moment for the mobile advertising industry. Apple’s smartphone technology fundamentally changed the industry and mobile user behaviour by creating a products and operating system that not just helped users in their professional lives, but also added entertainment value also. And smartphone are getting part in private life also. However smartphone the opportunity to create, but mobile ads were ugly and annoying, because used desktop browser ads and then reformat them for mobile web browsers. Following the accelerating trends, big giants started to gain serious foothold at mobile advertising industry. Google launches Android and acquire Admob for $750M, Apple starts iAD and according to eMartketer the U.S. mobile advertising market size approach the $1.5B.

Present days

The mobile advertising is continuously evolving. As mobile app were in high-demand and due to in-app mobile ads were offered for free, by the middle of this decade it becomes increasingly important to include mobile ads to apps with seamless experience. By 2015, an average user spend the 88% of his online mobile time in-app. To achieve the best possible user experience, mobile advertising companies began offering a great variety of mobile ads, like interstitials, overlay ads, mobile video ads and native ads to create higher engagement with users. Also the technology behind that serves these activities, the evolvement of analytical and RTB companies make the mobile advertising ecosystem to generate the best single user view to make mobile advertising.    

Tibor Nemes