The explosion in the popularity of handheld devices will see mobile advertising overtake the £2.6bn newspaper and magazine market this year, and leapfrog TV to become the biggest ad medium in the UK, according to a new forecast.
Mobile ad spend is expected to increase by 45% this year to £3.26bn in the UK, easily surpassing the £2.67bn that will be spent on print advertising across national and local newspapers and magazines, according to a report published on Wednesday by eMarketer.
Mobile ad spend will see a further surge of 35% next year, to £4.4bn, which will see it nudge ahead of traditional TV advertising which will account for £4.26bn of spend.
By the end of next year eMarketer estimates that mobile advertising will account for half of the £8.94bn that will be spent on digital marketing in the UK.
The research company does not have a breakdown of how much of mobile ad spend has successfully been hoovered up by the digital extensions of traditional newspaper, magazine and TV companies.
A second report from eMarketer highlights the seemingly inexorable in mobile usage.
UK adults are expected to spend an extra 30 minutes a day browsing websites and using apps on smartphones and tablets this year compared to 2014.
A typical Briton’s mobile usage - for non-voice activities - will climb from an average of 1 hour 57 minutes a day last year to 2 hours 24 minutes this year.
By 2017, Britons’ will be spending more than 3 hours a day glued to their smartphones.
By the end of next year the average adult will for the first time spend more time on digital devices – whether that is the desktop computer a tablet or a smartphone – than watching traditional media such as TV, reading newspapers and magazines or listening to the radio.
“UK consumers already have a pretty packed media day, but mobile use is clearly filling in any gaps,” said Bill Fisher, an analyst at eMarketer. “The rapid rise in time spent with mobile [devices] comes as no surprise. With each new smartphone or tablet release, the computing capabilities of these mobile devices improves, and consumers are clearly putting them to good use.”
