Mobile advertising spending could catch up to TV ad spends in 5 years
WASHINGTON – Amazon has unveiled a new advertising platform for mobile app developers in an effort by the e-commerce company to better compete against Google, which dominates the mobile advertising market.
“We work with many developers to support merchandising and advertising across our platforms and devices,” Amazon spokeswoman Lyn Hart said. “We realized that many more developers would benefit from this advertising and merchandising.”
Amazon’s new service has advertising campaigns starting at $100. Projections show digital advertising spending may catch up to TV advertising in less than five years.
Magna Global, a media research unit of Interpublic Group, told AdAge, “The shift to digital is having a deflationary impact on the entire market as digital formats, whenever comparable to traditional format, look cheaper and therefore erode the pricing power of traditional media categories.”
Amazon has a relatively small share of the $28.7 billion U.S. mobile ad market; Bloomberg Business estimates Amazon’s share of the market to be 1% as opposed to Facebook and Google, which have 17% and 35%, respectively.
Both Facebook and Google recently announced that the majority of their traffic now comes from mobile devices.
Facebook notes that 70% of its traffic now comes from smartphones, and Jerry Dischler, VP of product management for Google’s AdWords, the company’s mobile marketing product said, “Billions of times per day, consumers turn to Google for I want-to-know, I want-to-go, I want-to-do, and I want-to-buy moments. And at these times, consumers are increasingly picking up their smartphones for answers. This presents a tremendous opportunity for marketers to reach people throughout all the new touchpoints of a consumer’s path to purchase.”
“Google is a company built on intent and immediacy,” Dischler continued. “Our mission has always been to connect people with what they are looking for in the exact moment they are looking. These are moments that matter to consumers, to marketers and to us at Google because they are when decisions are being made and preferences shaped.”
Amazon’s expansion into mobile marketing comes on the heels of a number of efforts by the e-commerce giant to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving digital economy.
In March Amazon opened a store on Tmall, the business-to-consumer service run by the Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba, which dominates China’s e-commerce market of 640 million potential customers.
