Advertisers Work to Integrate Mobile into Cross-Platform Campaigns

May 2011 research from Chief Marketer found that 33% of marketers had run mobile campaigns in 2010, and more than half were doing so this year. The survey also indicated that just over a third of marketers had integrated mobile into an overall, cross-platform strategy as of last year. Many more--58%--plan to do so in 2011.

Study: Verizon Commands One-Third of U.S. iPhone 4 Market Share

A little less than five months after Verizon Wireless began selling Apple's iPhone 4, the carrier has claimed 32 percent of the U.S. iPhone 4 market, according to a report from mobile application analytics firm Localytics.

While the report noted that AT&T still commands 68 percent of the iPhone 4 market, Verizon's share has been steadily growing since the February launch of the Verizon iPhone, despite Verizon launching the phone eight months after AT&T did. Moreover, according to Localytics, the growth has been accelerating, with Verizon capturing 7 percent of the market in May and June alone. Verizon's share started at around 20 percent in February and grew to 25 percent in April and around 26 percent in May.

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Pew Study: 35% of U.S. Adults Own a Smartphone

More than one-third of all U.S. adults have a smartphone, according to a survey published by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, one of the clearest snapshots yet of how smartphones are changing the U.S. mobile landscape.

The survey found that 89 percent of all U.S. adults have some kind of cell phone and that 42 percent of those are smartphone owners, which translates into 35 percent of all U.S. adults. Pew broke the survey results down by varying demographic groups, and found that Android devices are the most popular, and that smartphones are more popular among the affluent.

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Mobile Ads Outperform Standard Banners

As more marketers from across industries begin to embrace mobile advertising, more attempts at measuring their efforts will not be far behind. Benchmarking efforts by digital advertising solutions provider MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) indicate that campaigns for different verticals should have different expectations—and that mobile banners see more clicks than standard banners on the PC-based internet.

In July 2010, MediaMind released statistics from 2009 showing that mobile banners beat standard banners in both clicks and conversions for automotive campaigns. Now, the higher clickthrough rate (CTR) for mobile banners can be extended across verticals.

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When's Prime Time in Mobile? Same as TV

Prime time in mobile is shaping up to look a lot like TV: Working stiffs turn to their phones after they've logged off their computers for the day and plopped down on the couch at home.

Users surf the mobile web and apps on phones most during the early evening, between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., and keep usage up through the night, according to a recent study from third-party ad server MediaMind. Looking at billions of mobile ad impressions across devices, carriers and operating systems, mobile ad click-through rates are also highest between 7 p.m. and midnight, with clicks reaching a peak at 8 p.m. MediaMind serves global campaigns for advertisers and agencies in all digital media, including mobile.

Mobile ad network Jumptap concurs with the findings and so does Google. The highest click-through rates -- 0.63% -- happen between 5 and 6 p.m. on Jumptap's U.S. mobile ad network, said Chief Marketing Officer Paran Johar. Findings are based on the network's 83 million unique users' 11 billion ad requests on both the mobile web and in apps.

Mobile's overlap with TV prime time especially makes sense considering so many consumers are parked in front of the tube with phone in hand. A whopping 86% of U.S. mobile internet users watch TV with their mobile devices, according to a Nielsen and Yahoo study published in January.

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Nielsen: Average U.S. Smartphone Data Usage Up 89% as Cost per MB Goes Down 46%

According to Nielsen’s monthly analysis of cellphone bills for 65,000+ lines, smartphone owners – especially those with iPhones and Android devices — are consuming more data than ever before on a per-user basis. This has huge implications for carriers since the proportion of smartphone owners is also increasing dramatically.

Growth in smartphone data usage is clearly being driven by app-friendly operating systems like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Consumers with iPhones and Android smartphones consume the most data: 582 MBs per month for the average Android owner and 492 MBs for the average iPhone user.

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comScore: Smartphones Now Owned by 1 in 3 Americans

comScore has released data showing 76.8 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in May 2011, up 11 percent from the preceding three month period. Google Android ranked as the top operating system with 38.1 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers, up 5.1 percentage points. Apple strengthened its No. 2 position with 26.6 percent of the smartphone market, up 1.4 percentage points. RIM ranked third with 24.7 percent share, followed by Microsoft (5.8 percent) and Palm (2.4 percent).

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