Prevailing In-Application Advertising Formats Prepared by the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence Version 3 Released November 2011 1
Introduction The in-app ad market has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 15 months, as publishers and marketers have both seen the value of apps to deliver content, entertainment, and services to consumers with smartphones or tablets. As of July 2011 there were over 500,000 apps in the Apple App Store, and over 250,000 in the Android Marketplace, 1 underscoring the growing importance of this medium. According to Pew Internet Life, half of US mobile phone owners have apps on their phone, and 34 percent of all US adults have downloaded apps to either a smartphone, tablet or both. 2 This third iteration of the IAB s Prevailing In-App Ad Formats study will highlight some of the trends in display ad sizes offered by publishers as of mid-2011. Twenty-three ad-seller members of the IAB provided ad sizes for this edition of the study, a large enough number that we feel confident that the more prevalent sizes identified here do possess some present traction in the marketplace. To date, this project has not investigated publisher ad format offerings related to audio and video creative. Although audio and video content and ads have a very natural home on smartphones and tablets, display ads are the most prevalent and the most varied ad formats on these devices today, and therefore tracking their evolution has been the IAB s first priority. As video and audio ads become more common, we will begin including details of those formats in this survey. The IAB hopes that this document serves as a useful guide to both publishers and the marketer/agency community. Publishers thinking about launching or relaunching apps can examine the sizes outlined as input into sizes they should consider designing into their applications. And marketers can get a better sense as to the ad sizes that might help them maximize their potential reach with the minimal number of formats. 1 Apple App Store: Apple approves its 500,000th app, but do you care? Yahoo! News, May 2, 2011. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/apple-approves-500-000th-app-care-160140999.html; Android Market: Android Market now has more than a quarter-million applications, AndroidCentral, July 14, 2011, http://www.androidcentral.com/android-market-now-has-more-quarter-million-applications 2 Half of adult cell phone owners have apps on their phones, PewInternet & American Life Project, November 2, 2011, http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/2011/apps-update.aspx 2
Methodology As in previous iterations of this study, the IAB fielded a brief survey to member companies that sell in-app ads, asking them to list the ad formats they currently support, across five major operating systems for mobile/portable devices. We asked about app offerings on smartphones and tablets separately. Operating Systems Included Android Apple ios BlackBerry Palm/HP s WebOS Windows Phone 7 23 IAB member companies responded with ad formats they support: Participating Publishers 4INFO Accuweather BBC Worldwide Brightroll Cars.com Comcast Digital Entertainment (Fandango Mobile) Conde Nast The Daily Dow Jones/Wall St Journal ESPN Impremedia Mansueto Ventures: Inc. & Fast Company Millennial Media MyWebGrocer National Geographic NBC Universal NY Times Pandora Pontiflex Time Inc. The Weather Channel White Pages Yahoo! A summary table showing the ad size data by OS platform, is included as an appendix to this document. Based on the data, we note the following key trends and developments. 3
Source: IAB, Prevailing Mobile In-Application Ad Formats, v.3, Nov., 2011 Key Findings 320x50 is dominant banner size on Android and ios; expandables vary widely Among portrait-oriented banners, the 320x50 3 continues to be offered by the largest number of publishers of Android apps. 300x50 and 320x50 ads were equally prevalent on ios devices. On BlackBerries and Windows Phone 7 smartphones, 300x50s were somewhat more common than 320x50s, while the 320x50 was the common format (albeit based on very limited data) on WebOS smartphones. 3 This paper uses pixel dimensions in a width-x-height format, so 320x50 means 320 pixels wide by 50 pixels high on the screen of the device. 4
Sources: IMDb, http://www.imdb.com/adspecifications/mobileads_android; AccuWeather, http://www.accuweather.com/ad-specs/mobile.html, College Media Network, http://www.collegemedianetwork.com/advertise/opportunities.html While 320x50s seem increasingly established as the common smartphone banner ad size, expandables from 320x50s are not yet all that common, and vary somewhat. Across Android and ios devices, there were four different 320x50 expandable sizes submitted in this survey. We expect that the release of the IAB s MRAID (Mobile Rich-media Ad Interface Definitions) v1.0 spec for mobile rich media ads will make building such creative more scalable, and thus spark more supply of and demand for expandable inventory. Large format smartphone ad sizes are highly diverse For ads larger than a banner, as for banner expandables, ad sizes in this survey varied widely. The IAB found about 8 320xX sizes on Android smartphones, and 10 320xX sizes on ios devices. This suggests that creative agencies looking to do executions larger than a banner face some hurdles in building creative to run across multiple publishers/apps. 5
Source: IAB, Prevailing Mobile In-Application Ad Formats, v.3, Nov., 2011 Source: IAB, Prevailing Mobile In-Application Ad Formats, v.3, Nov., 2011 Full screen ads (320x480) were the most common format on both platforms, and many of the other 320xX sizes were offered by only a single publisher in the survey. 6
Landscape-oriented banners make an appearance In the first iteration of this document, we noted that banner ad sizes generally were designed for apps in portrait mode, and that landscape banners were relatively rare. The IAB predicted that would change over time. The most recent survey bears this prediction out, at least assuming that the typical smartphone screen size (to the extent that such a thing exists) is still 320x480. On both ios and Android smartphones, we saw about five 480xX banners. That there are more landscape banners is a great thing, it suggests more and more app publishers are taking advantage of the dual orientations of smartphones in their content design. However, the number of 480xX sizes suggests that the industry may need to establish common landscape banner sizes in the near future. Source: IAB, Prevailing Mobile In-Application Ad Formats, v.3, Nov., 2011 ipad and Android Tablet ads size diversity is exciting, bewildering Three months after the launch of the ipad, our July 2010 survey captured 15 ad sizes for apps on that device. Marketer and publisher excitement about the tablet form factor has only grown since then, and the industry is beginning to develop some practical advice for designing effective campaigns on tablets. 4 In March 2010, 12 participating publishers reported 35 distinct ipad ad sizes. As of July, 2011, the 23 participating publishers reported nearly 70 distinct ad sizes an impressive total. Relatively few ipad ad sizes can be said to be common yet---with only two, the 300x250 IAB Medium Rectangle and the 728x90 IAB Leaderboard offered by more than 5 participating publishers. 4 See, for example the IAB Tablet Buyer s Guide, published October 2011, www.iab.net/tabletbuyersguide 7
Source: IAB, Prevailing Mobile In-Application Ad Formats, v.3, Nov., 2011 On the Android front ad sizes are also very diverse, with over 30 ad sizes reported by the 11 publishers who said they had an ad-supported Android tablet app currently. The diverse screen sizes of the various Android tablets on the market justifies some variety of ad sizes there. On Android tablets as on ipads, 300x250s and 728x90s were more widely offered than most other sizes. Leveraging IAB web standard sizes for in-page ads is convenient and consistent---these sizes are familiar to agencies and marketers, and creative designers have been building for them for years. However, they may not be optimal for tablets. We encourage publishers to closely track how those units are performing (in terms of consumer interaction, brand effectiveness, or other appropriate metrics). Increasingly, IAB members tell us that the tablet advertising market would benefit from definitive, standardized units that numerous publishers agreed to support in their apps or tablet web sites. Of course, this would not prevent publishers from offering unique sizes as well. However, we also hear warnings not to prematurely quell innovation and evolution in the tablet advertising market by imposing standards too early in the process. One place where an industry consensus might help would be around full screen ad sizes for tablets. For ipad alone, this survey captured about six full screen sizes, ranging from (landscape oriented) 1024x712 to 1024x1024 (the ipad s screen is 768x1024 pixels). Settling on two main sizes, for example one true full 8
screen and one that reserves space for publisher branding and/or the device s status bar would help simplify things. Looking ahead: Rising stars for mobile This survey has focused on collecting data regarding the dimensions of the banners, expandables (or collapsibles), and full-screen or interstitial ads that are the basic stock-in-trade of interactive advertising. These ad formats are critical to mass in-app advertising on smartphones and tablets, as they were in the early days of the web. However, while in some ways smartphone and tablet advertising today is like being back in the early days of the Web, in some ways it is not. For example, the available technologies, notably XML and HTML5, along with the faster connection speeds, better processing power, and touch capabilities of these devices, permit ad experiences far richer than were technically possible on the PC in 1996. In an effort to push standard ad formats outside the box of X-by-Y rectangles, the IAB launched a program called the Mobile Rising Stars in July 2011, 5 soliciting submissions of smartphone and tablet ad formats from across the mobile media world. By the time the submissions window closed, we received about 60 submissions from 26 companies, a truly phenomenal outpouring of creativity. The IAB will be evaluating these submissions over the next few months for both their scalability and feasibilty, as well as their appeal to the agency community. The IAB plans to announce finalist Rising Stars mobile ad formats in late February 2012. They will then be available to any publisher that wants to offer them. Following a period of real world deployment and testing, the IAB will assess how the finalists work in practice, with an aim to establish one or more of these formats as the first IAB standard ad units for mobile before the end of 2012. We hope that future iterations of this survey will reflect a move toward richer and more interesting ad types, including these upcoming Rising Stars formats, as the mobile marketplace continues its rapid evolution. 5 See: http://www.iab.net/risingstarsmobile 9