Mobile adver­tis­ing rev­enue enjoyed stratos­pher­ic glob­al growth in 2012, soar­ing by 82.8 per­cent to hit $8.9 bil­lion, accord­ing to new data released by the Inter­ac­tive Adver­tis­ing Bureau Mobile Mar­ket­ing Cen­ter for Excel­lence, IAB Europe and HIS.

The hard work of every­one hold­ing media jobs in the US mobile adver­tis­ing indus­try paid espe­cial­ly rich div­i­dends in 2012. The growth in U.S. rev­enue out­strip­ping the glob­al aver­age at 111 per­cent, tak­ing the nation­al total to $3.5 bil­lion. That’s a hand­some 39.8 per­cent of the glob­al figure.

The VP and Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of the IAB’s Mobile Mar­ket­ing Cen­ter of Excel­lence, Anna Bager, said, “Mobile is com­ing into its own as a pow­er­house adver­tis­ing medi­um. Today’s adver­tis­ing is hap­pen­ing in a world where ad cam­paigns can be planned and bought across glob­al net­works on mul­ti­ple media, but the mas­sive and con­tin­u­ing accel­er­a­tion of mobile’s inter­na­tion­al impact pro­vides new and excit­ing fron­tiers for con­tent and communication.”

Search is top of the tree

The lion’s share of glob­al mobile adver­tis­ing rev­enue was gen­er­at­ed by search, at 52.8 per­cent. Indus­try expert Chetan Shar­ma isn’t sur­prised. Peo­ple use their mobile devices to “look for stuff”, he said. Mobile dis­play ads came in sec­ond at 37.8 per­cent and mes­sag­ing third at 8.5 percent.

Shar­ma states, “Dis­play is more inter­ac­tive than mes­sag­ing and hence it out­paces mes­sag­ing which, while it is ubiq­ui­tous and the most per­va­sive of the three plat­forms, has low­er util­i­ty for marketers.”

Mas­sive audience

The Senior Direc­tor of the IAB’s Mobile Mar­ket­ing Cen­ter of Excel­lence, Joe Las­z­lo, not­ed the mas­sive scale of the mobile adver­tis­ing audi­ence in the U.S., where smart­phone adop­tion has now reached 54 per­cent; that’s 100 mil­lion peo­ple. Adver­tis­ers and mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies, Laslo says, are grow­ing in con­fi­dence and expe­ri­ence vis-à-vis the mobile chan­nel, and they’ve learned a lot about what works on tablets and smart­phones. They’re also mak­ing use of bet­ter tools, using stan­dards like MRAID and HTML5 to cre­ate excit­ing mobile adver­tis­ing cam­paigns, he said, and they have much bet­ter tech­nol­o­gy to mea­sure the effec­tive­ness of their campaigns.

Ster­ling Mar­ket Intel­li­gence ana­lyst Greg Ster­ling high­light­ed the over­whelm­ing might of Google – 90 per­cent of mobile search rev­enue will soon be mobile Web-based, he said, and most will go to the search colos­sus, with Bing and Yahoo far behind.