Mobile is crushing online in ad effectiveness.

Here at Luckie, we recently invited mobile analyst Joy Liuzzo from Insight Express to come share her thoughts on trends and technology. While she had a lot of fascinating insight to share, here's a slide that really blew me away:

Essentially, this chart shows that — based on three years' worth of research data — mobile advertising is twice as effective as online advertising when it comes to ad awareness, and a whopping six times more effective in the "holy grail" category of purchase intent.

Later in the presentation, she sliced it even thinner, showing that for the retail sector specifically, mobile ads were 14 times more powerful than online in the area of aided awareness and 8 times more effective in purchase intent.

I was simply flabbergasted by these numbers, so I followed up with a brief Q&A asking Joy to help put these findings into context. Check out her responses after the jump:

Q: These numbers were taken from your quarterly Digital Consumer Portrait survey. Is this chart showing the average of your survey responses from Nov. 07 – Dec. 09?

A: Yes.

Q. Looking year-to-year, are you seeing either set of numbers (mobile or online) go up or down?

A. We saw a very slight decrease in online advertising effectiveness campaigns during the bottom of the recession (doing a little of our own digging, we found a correlation with Consumer Confidence Index). On the mobile front, norms have decreased 1-2 percentage points since the early studies, but that’s not surprising. Overall, though, we’ve seen the norms remain stable the past couple of years.

Q. In general, why do you think it is that mobile seems so superior to online?

A. I wouldn’t say that it is superior, but mobile brings a couple of new things to the media mix. 1) Often times a unique audience that isn’t being reached online. 2) An ideal environment for advertising (one ad per page/communication, less clutter surrounding it, proportionally larger than online, and the secret sauce of a highly engaged audience).

Q. Could saturation be playing a role? We’re used to ads online and are more likely to tune them out?

A. Online ads are still effective, maybe not to the degree that mobile is, but they are still doing their job. I think the difference in effectiveness can be attributed somewhat to consumers tuning out, but more to do with the competition for attention on the page.

Q. How were these questions phrased in the survey?

A. (Joy responded by sending us sample questions from the survey, which essentially showed mobile users an ad, then asked questions like "Next time you are looking to purchase CATEGORY, which of the following brands, if any, would you consider for your next CATEGORY purchase?")

Q. When you break down mobile vs. online advertising by category, why do you think mobile is so vastly superior across the board?

A. I wouldn’t have expected to see great results across the verticals, and my only explanation is that mobile, by its nature, gives an extra boost to campaigns.

Q. What should marketers take away from these slides? That mobile is a better place to invest advertising dollars than online?

A. No. They should take away that mobile has a place in their media plan and can meet their campaign objectives.

Thanks again to Joy Liuzzo from Insight Express for taking the time to come chat with our agency about mobile trends. For lots more industry updates from Joy, I recommend following her on Twitter.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

Comments

[Keith]

Low clutter and competition (both in terms of advertising as well content:ad ratio) is huge.

In the race to monetize the non-mobile web, content providers got slap-happy putting up multiple ad units per page. In turn, they ironically diluted the value of their individual units. In recent years, we've seen many larger and more established players pushing back to fewer units per page as a result. But the mobile web/apps have had this from the start out of sheer necessity.