What Are the Top Mobile Advertising Categories?

This is a question we’re often asked. One answer is to look at Millennial Media’s most recent figures. In the midst of its monthly mobile marketing “Scorecards,” it recently reported the top 10 mobile ad categories, extrapolated from activity on its ad network.

Entertainment takes top honors, mostly due to movie studios that use mobile campaigns to push upcoming releases and fill theater seats with opt-in text alerts. SMS activity tied to television content is also part of this category (see post on SinglePoint).

Here is the rest of the list, which includes autos at No. 7, a local category that we expect to grow:

1. Entertainment
2. Telecommunications
3. Dating
4. Portals
5. Retail
6. Consumer packaged goods
7. Autos
8. Armed forces
9. Education
10. Travel

The study also uncovered that more advertisers are building mobile Web sites. Specifically 61.61 percent of ads served on its network lead users to some form of mobile landing page. An additional 30 percent of ads lead users to the advertiser’s own branded mobile site. On the user side, the study reported that average mobile Web users access 99 pages a month, with average session lengths of 5 1/2 minutes.