How Smartphones are Changing the Advertising World

The World Advertising Research Center (WARC) recently released a report stating that almost 75 percent of internet users will access the web with their smartphones by 2025. They estimate that 3.7 billion people will use only their smartphones to access the internet, up from the 2 billion who currently only use their phones.

Other interesting insights into how smartphones are changing the world as we know it include:

• Companies will spend more money on advertising campaigns aimed at smartphone users than they do for television ads. WARC found that social media advertising leads the way, followed by video ads, and finally mobile search ads.
• People will spend more time on their smartphones than they do on their desktops and laptops by the end of 2019.
• Only 69 million individuals will use a PC only to access the internet by 2025.
• As 5G rolls out during 2019, advertisers will turn their attention to high quality video ads to reach their audience.
• WARC found that 24 percent of smartphone users in the United States use an ad blocker on their mobile phones, making who sees the advertising questionable.
• Smartphone users spent $101 billion in 2018 via mobile apps. This included paid downloads, in-app purchases, and subscription fees. Most of the money was spent on gaming.
• There will still be 2.4 billion people by 2025 who don’t own a mobile phone.

It will be interesting to see how smartphones evolve over the next decade and how that changes the mobile advertising world as projected in this WARC report.