Pros with media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies are begin­ning to wake up to the poten­tial of in-app adver­tis­ing, but they’re still not ful­ly cap­i­tal­iz­ing on it yet. So says Marc Par­rish, an advis­er at the New York mobile rela­tion­ship man­age­ment agency, App­boy. And he’s not alone: his not-too-dis­tant neigh­bor, Shou­vik Paul, of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing plat­form MAZ New York, agrees that in-app adver­tis­ing is the way to go.

The app stampede

Recent research by MAZ found that con­sumers are now spend­ing 40 per­cent more of their time read­ing con­tent in apps than they do on web­sites. And yet mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies and oth­er mar­keters are still hes­i­tat­ing about divert­ing more fund­ing into in-app spend­ing. The pic­ture is start­ing to change, how­ev­er, accord­ing to Juniper Research. By 2018, it pre­dicts, spend­ing on in-app mobile adver­tis­ing will approach $17 billion.

Marc Par­rish notes that the mobile app mar­ket is vast, with more than a mil­lion apps avail­able, 102 bil­lion down­loads and $26 bil­lion in rev­enue. Not bad for an indus­try that sim­ply wasn’t there at all five years ago. As far as Par­rish is con­cerned, if you’re work­ing in media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing and you’re not plan­ning to boost spend­ing on this chan­nel, you’ve got your head in the sand. He says:

“Most mar­keters don’t even know that in-app ads exist as a for­mat. Face­book is the forc­ing func­tion, edu­cat­ing the mar­ket­ing that there is mon­ey to be made in mobile ads.

“Face­book’s mobile month­ly aver­age users increased 45 per­cent in just a year, from 604 mil­lion month­ly aver­age users in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2012 to 874 mil­lion month­ly aver­age users in the third quar­ter of 2013. That’s seri­ous growth.”

Time to go app 

Data from MAZ, which pow­ers over 600 apps in Google Play, Apple’s App Store and Ama­zon App­store, con­sumers return to apps con­tain­ing enter­tain­ment indus­try con­tent from Amer­i­can Media’s Star Mag­a­zine, Soap Opera Digest and Coun­try Week as many as twelve times with each week­ly issue.

Shou­vik Paul, the firm’s VP of Busi­ness Devel­op­ment, is firm­ly per­suad­ed that peo­ple are spend­ing more time than ever before on mobile devices and that most of that time is spent on apps. These days, he observes, few peo­ple open their browsers and type in facebook.com; they just go direct­ly to their Twit­ter or Face­book apps.