Survey Says: In-App Ads More Memorable Than Mobile Ads

A marriage would clearly be made between advertisers and content providers when smartphones appeared on the scene and users began to spend more and more time staring at their little devices, particularly as more and more content has become available for smartphones. After all, advertisers always want to be where the eyeballs are.

However, the mobile world is starting to fracture into different categories and there are some that consumers remember more than others, another key ingredient to building up advertising dollars. A new study from Compete shows that mobile users remember advertisements within apps more than ads that are simply in mobile websites.

Compete's researchers found that 52% of smartphone owners can “remember ads they see while using mobile apps, yet only 40% recall ads on websites they view while browsing the mobile Internet.”

With iPhone users, the number is even higher: two-thirds recall in-app ads, versus the one-third who report recalling ads on the mobile web.

"If the behaviors of iPhone and Android users, who have more experience interacting with different forms of mobile advertising, are indicative of where the industry is headed, we're starting to see what forms of advertising could be most effective moving forward," stated Danielle Nohe, director, technology and entertainment for Compete.

"In-app ads tend to feature rich media formats that fill the screen and appear at intervals during games, for instance — making them ostensibly more attention-grabbing than standard mobile Web display ads," commented Mark Walsh of MediaPost, according to BizReport.

[Image at top shows a 320x50 ad for Dunkin' Donuts within the Weather Channel's iPhone app, expandable to full-screen — and also shakable — via the IAB blog]