Mobile Ad Spend Wavers
Pixalate, a global ad fraud intelligence and marketing compliance platform released its latest report, Programmatic Ad Spend in the Age of COVID-19: Mobile App Advertising, providing insight into U.S. programmatic advertising in the month of March.
Key Findings:
- Programmatic mobile in-app ad spend drops 14% in March 2020
- Parenting apps soar: Apps in the ‘Parenting’ category on Android saw a 122% rise in programmatic ad spend.
- Food & Drink apps rise: Apps in the ‘Food & Drink’ category on iOS saw a 97% increase in programmatic ad spend
- Sports apps flop: Major sports apps, including ESPN Live Sports and the NBA’s official app, saw a 95%+ hit to programmatic ad spend in March.
Insight From the Industry
The major trend appearing across companies in almost every sector has been to scale back their advertising budgets, with the financial impact of these cuts seen in the latest wave of closures and layoffs that have hit the news publishing world just this week.
Key Insights:
- The prices of Facebook ads have declined 35 percent to 50 percent on average in recent weeks, said Alex Palmer, an analyst for Gupta Media.
- “Our business is being adversely affected like so many others,” Alex Schultz and Jay Parikh, Facebook vice presidents, wrote. “We’ve seen a weakening in our ads business in countries taking aggressive actions to reduce the spread of COVID-19.”
- Mark Mahaney, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, ran 50 Google searches last month and found no paid ads for travel and restaurants. “We can’t recall ever NOT seeing a ‘Paid Ad’ under the search term ‘Las Vegas Hotels,’” he wrote. “This is indicative of the broader trends across online advertising.”
A New Private Programmatic Marketplace
The Ad Council announced it has launched a programmatic private marketplace (PMP) which will give publishers and media companies the opportunity to donate digital media inventory in support of the Ad Council’s COVID-19 digital public service ads (PSAs).
- All campaigns running through the PMP are COVID19-related and were created and donated by NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS and Sesame Workshop. InMobi, OpenX, Xandr, New York Post and more have all donated media.
- The PMP, has already reached 1 million unique users with display and video PSAs, and is projected to deliver 100 million impressions through donated inventory within its first two months.
The PMP will enable the Ad Council to rapidly distribute new creative assets, optimize performance, refine audience targeting!
