On June 13, 2017 the IAB held a day long event in New York at the Convene Conference Center – The IAB Mobile Symposium. Aside from a slate of great presentations by presenters from Salesforce, Forbes, and Ford, the IAB also released two new reports that focus on the growth and complexity of advertising for mobile.

Of particular interest to users of AdSanity is Joe Stephens’ discussion Building Consumer Connections across Every Digital Dimension. Mr. Stephens is the Director of Native Strategy for Yahoo. His talk was focused on understanding your audience across all devices and all channels in order to better connect. However, there were several great sessions, and you will be able to see some highlights on their YouTube channel.

The Always On Report

At the symposium the IAB released “Always On – A Global Perspective of Mobile Consumer Experience.” This new report from the IAB’s research arm focuses on some statistical data collected from 18 different countries around the world. It puts together some strong findings about the prevalence of mobile use and specifically looks at how advertising on mobile is remembered and acted on. Some of the key takeaways:

  • Globally, 63% of mobile users use their device every 30 minutes or more
  • 49% of users in the study spend more than 3 hours per day on their device
  • On average, 45% of mobile web users have taken action after exposure to advertising

The report covers a lot of ground and shows the results broken down by country. You can see the highlights or the full report on the IAB’s site.

The Mobile Identity Guide for Marketers

Also released at the mobile symposium was a report of a different kind. While the Always On report focused on the amazing growth in mobile engagement, the Mobile Identity guide focused on how to solve one of the more difficult activities, tracking your customers across devices. The report covers targeting, measurement, and different approaches to identifying users reliably. As this issue touches on user privacy and security issues it’s going to be crucial for advertisers to understand how to handle. You can read the whole report here.

Highest First Quarter Ever

On the day after the event, the IAB, with their partner PwC, announced the highest first quarter earnings for digital advertising in the U.S. at $19.6 billion. This 23% increase marks the seventh year of consecutive double digit growth for digital earnings. Digital advertising is showing no signs of slowing and mobile advertising specifically is leading the way. You can find this and previous IAB revenue reports.