Presentation: State of Mobile Advertising in APAC

Opera Mediaworks, in partnership with the Mobile Marketing Association, has released the APAC State of Mobile Advertising report. The findings are based on Q2 2015 data from 400 million unique users on the Opera Mediaworks platform.

According to the report, while much of the growth and adoption of mobile advertising has been fueled by the strength of the mobile ad market in Japan, Korea and China, there has been significant growth in the four countries of India, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam. The study groups these countries as a sub-region called The Power 4, or P4.

"Opera Mediaworks represents almost 50 per cent of audience share of the market in India. We are making significant investments to grow the ecosystem and share insights on consumer behaviour and trends in mobile content consumption to help marketers leverage the mobile opportunity better," adds Gulati.

Key highlights from the State of Mobile Advertising report are as below:

• Smartphone use in the Asia Pacific region continues to grow at a pace at par with the rest of the world, with page-view volume on mobile websites and apps approaching global averages.

• The P4 sub-region has seen a dramatic 545 per cent increase in smartphone adoption since 2013, making it one of the fastest growing sub-regions in the world.

• The P4 countries represent less than half (43 per cent) of the population of Asia and account for less than 30 per cent of regional internet users, yet over 76 per cent of these users access the internet via mobile. For India, Opera estimates that 77 per cent of internet users can access the web via a mobile device.

• Mobile growth can largely be attributed to the rapid adoption of Android devices. In the second quarter, the Android operating system took the top position in market share of impressions served to mobile devices, accounting for more than 60 per cent of traffic in APAC and over 55 per cent in India.

• There is a rapid adoption of mobile video-ad units across the region. The ratio of video-ad impressions served in India is 0.68:1, higher than the average across Asia.

Demographics and behaviour of the average mobile users in India

• Male users dominate across the region. In India, 9 out of 10 mobile users are male.

• Indian users are overwhelmingly young; the average user age is under 23. Also, 50 per cent are between 18-23 years old.

• The most visited mobile sites and apps by users in P4 region are in the Social Networking category. However, Indian users are more drawn to sites and apps that serve music, video, media and entertainment content, followed by technology content.

• The top three countries in the P4 region in terms of data consumption are Vietnam, Indonesia and India. The average data consumption in these countries respectively is around 90, 65 and 60 MB per month.

Revenue winners and emerging mobile ad formats

• Business, finance and investing publishers fared well, accounting for a whopping 42 per cent of revenue paid to mobile publishers across the P4 region.

• In India, social networking sites and apps provided the highest number of impressions for advertisers, followed by news and information and sports category. However, the highest eCPMs were earned by news and information publishers.

• The impressions of advertising on communication services are much higher than global average by and as much as 15X for revenue.

On the growth of mobile advertising in India, Gulati comments, "Mobile advertising in India is in infancy and presents a massive opportunity. As hundreds of millions of consumers go online in India in next few years, mobile will be the first and, in many cases, the only gateway to the internet. New kind of products and services will be consumed on mobile, media and content consumption will get more broad-based and brands will create break-through experiences for consumers. Mobile is the future of digital advertising."

"Mobile advertising is a very young industry; it has many years of explosive growth ahead of it. Obviously, as we get better with understanding of consumers and how they use mobile devices, there will be better audience targetting and richer connections. Video advertising will explode on mobile and it's clear that mobile video with television-like experience will be the format of choice for brand marketers. Beyond that, more publishers will choose to deploy native advertising formats to deliver seamless user experience," he adds about future trends.

Opera Mediaworks is a mobile ad platform for brands, delivering breakthrough marketing. It claims to have worked with over 90 per cent of the AdAge top 100 advertisers and 18 of the top 25 global publishers. A fully-owned subsidiary of Opera Software, Opera Mediaworks is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices worldwide.