Why audience segments are the new currency in mobile advertising

In the age of data-driven digital and mobile marketing, where mobile ad spend is forecast to account for 72 percent of United States digital ad spend by 2019, we are at a critical inflection point of changing the mobile advertising currency from impressions to audience segments.

The shift from desktop to mobile has advertisers following suit, and they are not looking back. Campaign success is now portrayed as the ability to grow a brand’s audience by converting prospects that drive mobile purchases, rather than reaching mobile consumers to reinforce brand awareness and recognition.

The living proof of this is the Snapchat Discover feature. Since launch more than a year ago, there are now 20 channels produced daily by established media brands such as People, CNN, ESPN and The Wall Street Journal, along with Vice and BuzzFeed. 

To reach their core target audience – millennials and Generation Z – advertisers are starting to see mobile advertising not just as an option, but as a necessity. 

In the face of this media and social revolution, advertisers have fully embraced mobile, and are becoming significantly more intelligent in the process. 

Advertisers can see the potential from mobile and the ability to accurately identify their audience of choice. This is especially critical when it comes to brand dollars in the programmatic arena, where advertisers are demanding maxed-out campaigns with large budgets, but reach an extremely narrow audience. 

Gone are the days of blindly buying cost-per-thousand (CPM) impressions in Web sites where the age and gender demographics would broadly match their target persona. 

The last two years have seen digital spray-and-pray campaigns based on impressions pave the way to sophisticated audience-based campaigns that are enabled through data-science based targeting and ad-serving capabilities driven through machine learning.