Mobile advertising has gained a strong position in the last few years and as 2015 approaches, we are only going to see its importance increase.

We believe that there are going to be four main trends for 2015 within mobile advertising:

Personal

A certain amount has been done to make mobile advertising more personal, in much the same way that online advertising has been targeted.

The options for this are actually greater with mobile advertising due to the nature of them. They are generally only used by one person, where cookies from a computer can be from a number of people.

Buying is often done through apps, which can then help to create better data metrics as the entire app can be built to collect certain information, rather than relying on coding through a web browser.

Location based

Unlike computers, which can have location based adverts for a large area, the practice is not going to be particularly widespread, simply because people tend to use them whilst in a static position, rather than walking around.

Phone on the other hand are used mainly whilst on the move. Most smartphones today also have GPS capability, meaning that the location of the person using it can be pinpointed to within a few metres, which allows for truly localised advertising. If somebody has previously shown an interest in a certain pair of shoes for instance, they may want to receive a notification that the shoes they have looked at are available in a nearby shop.

This kind of thing has been done with contained groups in certain situations, but generally with RFID technology. However, 2015 is likely to see this moving out to a wider market and have a more complex potential use. This could be anything from personalised offers in shops based on pervious browsing or specific offers after somebody has left a shop to bring them back at another time.

Seamless Video Integration

2014 saw video advertising hit new heights on regular internet browsers. It appeared on some of the world’s biggest sites and rather than being an unnecessary annoyance it managed to fit with the UX of the site without having an adverse effect on the way that people navigated or digested content.

At the moment, this has not happened with mobile video advertising. Up until now, it has been intrusive and detrimental to how people are using sites or apps. It is only a matter of time before it becomes integrated in much the same way that is has on desktop browsers.

2015 is likely to see the start of this transformation, with the average smartphone screen size increasing, the scope for this will only increase. How this will be done is still not a universally accepted fact as it cannot be done in the same way as desktop (the screen sizes alone make this impossible) but by the end of 2015 we are likely to see at least some experimentation in the area.

Wearable Advertising

For the last few years it has always been said that ‘next year is the year of the wearable’ without any real gains in their usage. However, we can safely say that the status of wearables will increase in 2015 simply because it is when Apple is entering the marketplace.

This alone is likely to see millions of people trying wearables for the first time and realising the benefits they can have, which will in turn open up a new market for mobile advertising. The likelihood is that it will appear in similar ways to the start of mobile advertising, with agencies making tentative steps into the market, but is likely to be the jumping off point for something much bigger in the future.