Why aren’t mobile apps considered trusted, premium media environments?
This sounds like a stupid question or indeed a suggestion that the mobile app environment isn’t premium or trusted media.
It’s rare to talk to anyone across the industry today where the importance of trusted, premium media isn’t raised.
From ad fraud to MFA to brands suitability and the role of context, advertisers and their agencies are, rightly, obsessed with advertising appearing in media that is both premium and trusted by the consumer, their customer.
These conversations dominate the trade press, conference stages and industry conversations everywhere.
But mobile advertising and the mobile app ecosystem is rarely included in these conversations.
A conversation I had just this week with Nigel Ashton, who’s just joined InMobi, made me realise how odd this is.
It’s a tired cliche that the mobile phone is the most trusted and personal of devices. And therefore it must follow that the media experiences on these devices are also some of the most personal and trusted of all the media people consume.
The app ecosystem takes this even further. The closed environment, largely within some kind of registration wall, means MFA sites are virtually unheard of and it’s almost impossible for consumers to stumble across a nefarious app. Of course mobile ad fraud exists but it’s tiny in comparison to online.
The entire mobile app ecosystem is largely composed of high-quality media that consumers trust, enjoy and are happy to pay for.
Surely the dream of any advertiser?
Why then is mobile and mobile apps, still often viewed as an add one to a media plan or viewed as a media only to be used to reach particular audiences like gamers, rather than the mass media is sure is?
The global mobile application market size was valued at $252.89bn in 2023, so no one is decrying its success.
But when every brand today is trying to take an omnichannel approach to marketing, at a time when advertisers are increasingly aware of the quality of the media environments their brands show up in, why is mobile still so often viewed as a niche or specialist channel?
Brand safe? Trusted? Premium media? Surely that’s mobile apps.
