Rapid Growth of Mobile Advertising in China

China has become the third most powerful advertising market with more than €500,000 million of Internet users and 28.5% of smartphone penetration. China has almost overtaken the supremacy of United States in terms of search advertising, not only because of the plethora of people, but also because a large percentage of people (25%) spend more than 4 fours surfing the Internet.

According to AdChina, 88% of users owning a smartphone installed mobile apps on their devices and more than 51% spend lots of time using them. In addition, due to the prohibition of social networks such as Facebook, Youtube or Twitter, homegrown platforms like Qzone, WeChat or Sina Weibo are gaining popularity.

Advertising in the Chinese social media will increase by 67.6% by 2018, and mobile social networking will grow up to 100%, accounting for 10% of the total digital marketing in this country and 3.5% of the total earnings.

EMarketers estimates that outlays on mobile ads soared more than two-fold in 2015 to reach $15.82 billion. Mobile constituted 22.3% of total media ad spending in China—a higher level than in any other market worldwide. Still, eMarketers predict total mobile ads spending in China will climb 58.0% in 2016, and annual growth will expand by at least 20% by 2019. The increasing spending on mobile is partly attributed to the continued growth of consumer spending in China, which accounted for 60% of GDP growth in H1 2015, according to a July 2015 Bloomberg article. EMarketer's estimated figure for mobile ad spending in China is considerably higher than other sources.

In the light of the expansionary mobile ads market, advertisers have started to consider smartphones as a way to access clients and communicate with them, leaving aside the conception of a device for marketing campaigns. It consists of a personal use medium with which the brand can get really useful information about necessities, likes and consumption habits of its target client. For this purpose, companies have to manage and value several tools to redirect their strategy and to get more clients. For this reason, marketers have decided to invest more in digital advertising marketing, especially mobile marketing tools instead of continuing to stir up the television advertising. In China, the top 5 advertisers are P&G, China Mobile, Volkswagen, L’Oreal and 360Buy. These giants have known how to take advantage of this stark shift in the advertising field.

According to the consultant company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 71% of the Chinese population who purchase online will use their smartphones to shop, which means that they make a purchase almost once a week. It is a big difference with regard to the 32% of Americans who use their smartphones to buy. This is why major brands are aware of the importance of investing large amounts of money in ecommerce and therefore they include quite a lot of ads in their ecommerce websites.