The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today published a report entitled “Prevailing Mobile In-Application Advertising Formats,” that looks at current and future trends for mobile ad formats and placement on a variety of platforms and devices.
The IAB fielded a simple survey to members who sell in-app ads, asking them to summarize the ad formats they currently support, across seven different platforms for mobile devices, including Android, Blackberry, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad, Palm, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Participating publishers in the survey included companies such as 4INFO, the Associated Press, CNN.com, Millennial Media and Pandora, just to name a few.
In terms of smartphone platforms, the IAB concluded that banner sizes are “most harmonious,” meaning the surest way to run a campaign across a majority of smartphone app platforms is to stick to the largest of the 6:1 Mobile Marketing Association mobile banner sizes, which is 300 x 50. A majority of the participants in this survey support 300 x50 directly, and those that don’t generally have a size slightly larger where a 30 0x 50 will fit okay with black or white bars around it.
Interestingly, no publisher in the survey currently offers a landscape-oriented banner (for example, 480×75) for a smartphone app. The IAB expects that landscape ads may start to appear as apps meant to be used in that mode grow more common. Given that apps increasingly work in both portrait and landscape modes, the IAB speculates that one possible market evolution will be for in-app campaigns to design distinct and complementary portrait and landscape banners that run simultaneously.
The report includes much information and can be downloaded here. It breaks down formats for each of the seven aforementioned platforms and even discusses emerging best practices for the industry.
