In-app advertising is big business and the proliferation of apps, mobile consumption, and targeting opportunities mean it’s a continually growing market. However, there are some schools of thought that if marketers really want to engage with their consumers, mobile web yields better results. ExchangeWire speak with Adam Gilsenan (pictured below), chief media consultant, YOC, who draws on his experience in the publisher business to explain his stance to marketers from the other side of the fence.

Let’s just clarify the options available to brand marketers who may be considering dipping into or increasing their mobile advertising spend.

We have the mobile website, consisting of browser-based, HTML pages. The mobile website can display text content, data, images, and video. They can also access mobile-specific features such as click-to-call (to dial a phone number) or location-based mapping.

Then you have apps, which are downloaded and installed on your mobile device, rather than being rendered within a browser. Users visit device-specific portals to find and download apps for a given operating system.

So, the proposition for advertisers looking to invest in in-app marketing has been quite clear. It offers marketers a better opportunity to target the right audience at the right time. Many would argue that it’s more than that. Many would say that in-app ads capture the users’ attention, a bit like cinema ads, and then encourage them to interact without being interrupted. Again, just like ads before the movie, but without being told to turn off your mobile.

So, in-app mobile ads are important and brands’ spend on this medium is certainly going up. The reason in-app advertising works is because it is supported by location data. This enables advertisers to understand the context of their ad placement that leads to increased engagement. So, as advertisers, we get access to data, such as location, weather demographics, etc., to give us a full picture of what is going on in real-time. We can then combine these layers of data and serve ads accordingly. Having access to all this data, and being able to use it effectively across the board, allows marketers to target their campaigns with greater accuracy, and that’s what is turning them towards this medium. Additionally, click rates are much higher with HTML5 ads (swiping, shaking, etc. within the ad) and stickiness is greater.

However, before you rush off to spend more of your marketing budget on in-app advertising, you should consider this: apps generally work very well on tablets. They work well because people tend to pick up their tablet at home. They’re used primarily for entertainment, rather than a business tool and this lends itself well to apps, as viewers get that cinema feel, as mentioned earlier.

When you consider how most people view apps on their mobile phones, however, the experience is very different. Mobile is much more of a ‘dip-in-and-out’ experience, which means the consumption of apps is very different, compared with tablets, and the results can be very disappointing.

When I was head of trading at The Mail we launched Mail Plus, an interactive app that provided a very different user experience from the newspaper and MailOnline. The interactive app was expensive to produce and adoption was poor. We found that we achieved more traffic via mobile web than the app and so moved away from the interactive app, opting instead for a flat replica of the newspaper. We saw a huge increase in traffic, so the change worked. We found that users just wanted a replica of the paper available on their tablet. What we learned was that the distribution of content was the key.

If your objectives are related to marketing or public communications, a mobile website will always make sense. This is because a mobile website has a number of inherent advantages over apps, including broader accessibility, compatibility and cost-effectiveness. Apps, on the other hand, require the user to first download and install them from an app marketplace before the content or application can be viewed – a significant barrier between initial engagement and action/conversion.

The industry can learn from the journey we have taken with mobile advertising; and, while there are significant returns to be made from in-app marketing and mobile web, the key is to understand consumption and which platform works best for you. eMarketer estimate that the total mobile ad spend will top USD$100bn (£70.3bn) by the end of this year. That’s a colossal amount of money. Make sure you spend your slice wisely.