It is no secret amongst those hold­ing media jobs in the mobile adver­tis­ing indus­try that con­sumer pack­aged good mar­keters have been slow to adopt the chan­nel; how­ev­er, new research by Mil­len­ni­al Media and com­Score sug­gests that this assump­tion is yesterday’s news. Things are chang­ing fast: CPG adver­tis­ers more than tre­bled their mobile spend in 2012.

Emerg­ing trends among CPG marketers

If you are look­ing for media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing, it is as well to get wise to the dimen­sions of this new devel­op­ment. Mobile is being tak­en up by CPG at a faster rate than any oth­er lead­ing cat­e­go­ry. Amongst indus­try ver­ti­cals, con­sumer goods ranked at num­ber six, with spend­ing soar­ing by 235%.

CPG adver­tis­ers are also much more like­ly to have aware­ness as a goal in their mobile cam­paigns – 46% of them had this goal, the study shows, as com­pared with just 14% of mobile adver­tis­ers in gen­er­al. This is dri­ving them to use video – their pre­ferred aware­ness-build­ing medi­um – very heav­i­ly. The study indi­cates that CPG adver­tis­ers are twice as like­ly to use mobile video as adver­tis­ers overall.

This is cre­at­ing a phe­nom­e­non in itself. The growth of inter­est amongst CPG adver­tis­ers in dig­i­tal video is pro­pelling TV-style rat­ings for online view­er­ship and lead­ing them to switch increas­ing­ly from TV adver­tis­ing to dig­i­tal video advertising.

Loca­tion tar­get­ing fea­tures promi­nent­ly amongst CPG adver­tis­ers – so much so that CPG is the fourth biggest ver­ti­cal cat­e­go­ry to use loca­tion tech­nol­o­gy, despite the fact that over­all it is only the sixth largest spender. Amongst the sub­cat­e­gories in CPG, beau­ty and bev­er­age adver­tis­ers account­ed for 69% of loca­tion tar­get­ing usage in the industry.

A gen­der disparity?

Anoth­er inter­est­ing trend for intre­pid mobile adver­tis­ing media jobs seek­ers is this: there is a gen­der dif­fer­ence in mobile usage. Men tend to use their phones to find deals, com­pare prices, check prod­uct avail­abil­i­ty or make online pur­chas­es, while women tend to text or call friends while in-store to com­mu­ni­cate about or research products.

Final­ly, the in-store use of mobile phones is big­ger than most mobile adver­tis­ing afi­ciona­dos might appre­ci­ate. Near­ly half (47%) of men and 40% of women used their smart­phones to track down coupons in store. 41% of women and 29% of men used their phones to find out about con­sumer-prod­uct details.