Damon Scarr is Commercial Director at Yahoo!7. Here he discusses the maturing mobile ad market in Australia and how publishers there can build a sustainable revenue model in the mobile channel.

Mobile advertising seems to have had several false starts over the last few years. How is the proliferation of mobile and tablet devices now kick-starting adoption for advertisers?

With 51 percent of Australians now owning a smartphone and almost 40 percent expected to own a tablet by the end of this year, mobile content and advertising is now essential to capture the eyeballs of consumers. The consumption habits of mobile users are also opening exciting possibilities for advertisers. 75 percent of Australians now regularly interact with two or more devices at once allowing advertisers to extend their contact with consumers across multiple platforms and boost the likelihood that their audiences will remember, recommend and act upon the brand messages they experience.

How have Australian advertisers working with the mobile channel?

Advertisers are starting to experiment with mobile and tablet advertising and are considering how it interacts with their ‘traditional’ digital campaigns. One great example from the Yahoo!7 network involved an end-of-year retail offer from a luxury car brand which implemented a campaign across magazines, TV, online and mobile. The campaign targeted iPhone users across the Yahoo!7 mobile network and allowed them to access interactive rich media, book a test drive or find a dealer right from their phone. The mobile aspect of this campaign allowed real-time responses to awareness generated across all the platforms and helped take the consumer through the decision process and closer to purchase.

Are there any particular industries or sectors that you believe are doing mobile particularly well?

Autos and financial services have traditionally been early adopters of new advertising formats and this is proving to be the case for mobile and tablets.

How is Yahoo!7 helping smaller businesses extend their online reach into the mobile sphere?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that businesses that don’t have a mobile-ready presence will start to see a negative impact on their businesses as more people try to connect and find their business via a mobile device. Businesses of all sizes should be thinking about their mobile presence. Yahoo!7 has recently launched a new offering through our travel business, Totaltravel, which creates mobile sites for travel operators. We’ve seen good demand so far.

Where do you see mobile display advertising in 3-5 years? What are the opportunities for savvy advertisers?

Given the age old adage that advertising follows eyeballs we expect the demand for mobile advertising to continue to grow. We see that the opportunity for advertisers is that mobile campaigns will be integrated into cross-platform campaigns as research suggests that mobile advertising works better when it works with ‘traditional’ digital formats. Marketers will increasingly take advantage of multimedia multitasking and savvy advertisers who move into the space early stand to reap significant benefits. Consumers are looking to premium, trusted environments for their mobile experiences. With consumers having an ever-growing appetite beyond basic content for mobile video, more targeted content delivered through location based services and mobile payments; there has never been a better time for brands to start engaging with consumers in a mobile environment.

Additionally, recent research conducted by Yahoo!7 has shown that people consider their mobile devices to be much more personal in terms of how they treat the device and the content and experiences on it. We expect that advertisers will increasingly harness this by adopting more personalised advertising using real-time creative and messaging tailored for a user’s location, time of day and content preferences. This increased personalisation of mobile advertising will lead to increased relevancy of advertising and great adoption of advertising messages by users.

What advice do you give to publishers who are growing towards 50% of traffic arriving from a mobile whilst still not being able to effectively monetise that growing %?

While the proposition that as more eyeballs move to mobile the related web traffic may decline sounds logical, we’ve not seen this happening to a big degree to date. Rather, people are consuming more on more devices, rather than supplementing one device for another. It comes back to what makes sense for the user. We are seeing people use mobile more when they wake up and are in transit, whilst laptop and desktop web-based activity is used where the task is more complex or requires a lot of typing. Tablets are used most in the evening and often on the lounge or in bed. Monetising these new audiences in a way that makes sense for publishers and advertisers will evolve as we understand more and more about user behaviours.