As mobile programmatic matures in Canada, long-term inventory trends are taking shape. According to a new report from Addictive Mobility, 2014 saw a few key verticals emerge as the dominant sources of Canadian mobile app inventory on the exchanges.
Overall, Addictive’s programmatic inventory (which is wholly focused on apps and does not include mobile web) grew from 8 million impressions per month in December 2013 to 15.8 million per month in December 2014— 95% of which were in Canada. This growth doesn’t necessarily reflect the growth of the Canadian market as a whole, since Addictive completed several big supply integrations this year to add inventory that was previously available on other platforms.
But while mobile is still too immature for any one company to have a total view of the market, Addictive is one of the top programmatic buyers of mobile inventory in Canada. So the industry can assign at least some significance to its findings; they reveal some big trends in the kind of apps that are being sold through programmatic channels.
The report found music app volumes grew 150% from Q4 2013 to Q4 2014. They now account for the largest share of mobile programmatic inventory. Productivity apps, which saw growth of around 22%, ranked second overall.
App categories ranked by share of total inventory, 2013 vs. 2014Social inventory grew 334% year-over-year, which Addictive attributes to social apps Pinger, AskFM and Skout coming online in the Canadian market. (Addictive categorizes apps based on their primary function in order to avoid duplication across categories, so AskFM, for example, is counted as social rather than music.) Premium social apps like Facebook and Snapchat still don’t sell mobile ads programmatically.
Other categories such as books, travel and finance saw a significant drop in inventory as publishers reserved more of their impressions for direct buying. Travel and hotels apps saw the biggest drop, with publishers moving two thirds of their inventory out of programmatic.
On the buying side, the data showed that telecom companies were the biggest buyer of mobile programmatic by a wide margin. That’s surprising, because data from Casale Media has consistently shown that in desktop programmatic in Canada, telecom significantly lags behind retail and auto. Unlike the U.S., telecom companies just haven’t been that interested in programmatic in Canada. Mobile may offer the big telcos a greater opportunity to leverage device and subscriber data to target audiences that are on (or off) their network.
Demand growth by advertiser category, year-end 2013 to year-end 2014On the other hand, the desktop ecosystem currently offers more opportunities for simple retargeting and offer-driven direct marketing, which may be why retail isn’t a big contender in the more brand-focused app space. The dominance of telecom in mobile could be a sign that retail and auto have underinvested in mobile programmatic compared to desktop.
Addictive’s data also showed significant growth in alcohol and gambling companies buying on the platform, which Cross said is due to a softening of federal and provincial regulations about advertising gambling services online.
Paul Cross, Addictive vice-president of insight and partner relations, says he was also struck by how well consumers had responded to interstitials and mobile video units. Full-screen interstitials saw average click-through rates rise 124% through 2014, while banner CTRs fell 36%. Video, which Addictive rolled out in March 2014, had a strong average CTR of 11.3% through its first year.
