Mobile advertising is not only gaining traction across Asia Pacific, with almost half (45%) of all digital advertising campaigns across the region including a mobile component, it’s also proving to be more effective at reaching specific age demographics.
That’s according to a new benchmarking study of the global digital advertising landscape by Nielsen, which assessed more than 47,000 digital campaigns across 17 countries in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific,
The Digital Ad Ratings Benchmarks Report, which Nielsen says provides a baseline for understanding digital advertising reach performance to help evaluate campaign success, found that rapid growth in mobile measurement is being driven by the mobile-first nature of many markets in Asia – especially in China, where every campaign Nielsen measured included a mobile component. Around 70% of all campaigns measured in Thailand, Malaysia, and India included a mobile component on the media plan, Nielsen says.
From the blog post:
Marketers are more willing to invest in a platform if there is independent, third-party measurement to provide transparent performance metrics and inform best practices that reduce waste and maximize return on ad spend. This message is especially resonant for mobile. Ever since Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings introduced mobile measurement in its service over the course of 2015, advertisers, agencies, publishers, and platforms have been eager to better understand how much of their intended audience their mobile campaigns are actually reaching.
According to the benchmarking report, advertising served up via desktop still outperforms mobile advertising when targeting broad audience segments. For example, desktop advertising intended for people aged 18-to-49 achieved a 70% on-target success rate, compared to 66% for mobile.
However, said Annette Kunst, Managing Director of Media at Nielsen Singapore, for more niche audiences or narrower segments such as the 18-to-34 age group, mobile has a higher success rate, albeit by just a few percentage points – 65% of mobile ads hit their demo mark, compared to 61% for desktop.
“Mobile’s success reaching more narrowly defined audiences reinforces that mobile devices provide a highly personalized platform with the potential for more precise connections, and that’s reflected in the rapid increase we’ve seen in mobile advertising,” noted Kunst. “With increasing media fragmentation, marketers need to consider all the screens at their disposal when trying to reach their audience. These benchmarks can help media buyers and sellers better evaluate total digital reach.”
That said, the Nielsen study also found that digital advertising campaigns in Asia-Pacific overall are getting better at reaching demographic groups, especially the highly prized 18-34 year old segment, as advertisers and media agencies get better at media planning and buying.
The report found that across Asia, digital advertising campaigns targeting 18-to-34 year olds had the highest on-target success rate, with 63% of the advertising hitting the mark, up from 53% last year.
Campaigns targeting women within the 18-to-34 age group experienced the highest lift in on-target reach, up 15 percentage points from last year to 51% this year.
Photo by fronx 
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