The annual Internet Trends Report from Mary Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, is a veritable sermon on the mount for anyone interested in the growth of the internet and its impact on major markets.
Per usual, Meeker’s 2015 Internet Trends Report is a behemoth of 196 densely-researched but neatly curated slides. The complete report is deserving of every marketer’s careful perusal, but as a marketing-focused tech company, we noticed one major marketing opportunity among Meeker’s prescient presentation…
Mary Meeker On The Mobile Marketing Moment
Meeker is quick to highlight the rise of vertical viewing among content consumers. By “vertical viewing,” Meeker means the orientation of the screen on which content is consumed (i.e. smartphone = vertical; television = horizontal).
Over the past 20 years, mobile phone users exploded from 80 million to 5.2 billion globally, or from 1% to 73% global population penetration.
The logistical impact of the proliferation of smart phone usage is simple: we now consume more content on a vertical screen than ever before. In fact, vertical viewing now accounts for 29% of total multi-platform view time.
Meeker explains that this rise in the vertical intake of content is staggering even across the last 5 years. From 2010 to 2015, the horizontal vs. vertical viewing ratio shifted from 95/5 to 70/30.
If this trend continues (and all sign suggest is will), content marketers will need to prioritize the creation of mobile-friendly content. To this point, Meeker highlights that full-screen vertical video ads on SnapChat have a completion rate 9X higher than horizontal mobile ads.
The $25B+ Opportunity For Mobile Ad Spending
Given the rise in mobile content consumption, Meeker also surfaces a startling disconnect between mobile content consumption and mobile ad spending.
In the U.S., companies continue to over-index spending on print advertisements despite shifting media consumption habits. But while mobile accounts for nearly a quarter of total media consumption time (24%), mobile ad spending has yet to catch up.
For many marketers, the hesitancy to push advertising dollars on mobile often stems from lower conversion rates on mobile versus desktop. But as Meeker points out, the rise in mobile content consumption has spurred the creation of new conversion-focused ad technologies across many key digital channels.
Pinterest’s new Cinematic Pins are just one example. (Want to get started with some vertical content on Pinterest? Check out our guide to Pinterest’s Cinematic Pins here!)
For more of Mary Meeker’s internet trends, check out her complete presentation here. But in the meantime, start prioritizing your mobile content!