Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
The sky-rocketing growth in mobile advertising continues apace as the UK market alone grows from just £526m in 2012 to over £1bn this year, an increase of 90%, as digital advertisers go hunting for consumers across smartphone and tablet devices.
The digital ad spend figures, released by eMarketer earlier this week are not only a reflection of Britain’s love-affair with smartphones – the UK has the highest smartphone usage in the world – but the figures also mirror Facebook’s own experiences with mobile advertising which has seen a 25% year-on-year growth. UK Mobile ad spend is estimated to earn the social media giant around £140m mobile this year. Looking further aheadeMarketer estimates that spend on digital advertising will hit £8.4bn by 2017 with spend on mobile ads accounting for around £3bn of that.
Whilst these figures may appear heady, if anything they could certainly in the medium term, be shown to be overly conservative. As consumers spend more time using their mobile devices not only to browse, but to make transactions, this will in turn attract ever increasing hordes of mobile advertisers.
So why will consumers spend more time on their mobile devices? Firstly connection speeds are improving. The much heralded 4G is already a reality with EE becoming the first UK mobile network to start selling 4G smartphones. With faster and more reliable connection consumers will also start making more use of video – in particular we can expect fast growth in video advertising.
With more and more users owning a tablet, and starting to use these as their primary surfing device that’s more consumer hours, more eyeballs, more impressions and more clicks.
But just as important as growing the mobile audience is ensuring that ads are relevant to the end consumer. As with “traditional” online advertising specialist mobile ad targeting technology needs to be rolled out, and the creative needs to improve as well. Consumers may use their mobile devices differently than they do their desktops – and the creative needs to reflect this. It’s simply not just a case of taking an online campaign and applying this to a mobile ad campaign – one size does not fit all.
With the proliferation of traffic coming from mobile ad-networks there’s likely to be a bountiful supply of mobile ad inventory. But as with any media buying campaign the real test for mobile advertising will be whether or not it delivers a return on investment for brand owners. Mobile advertisers will need to be careful to avoid the fraudulent traffic sellers – TrafficCake for example helps audit media buying campaigns – and just as importantly optimising campaigns.
Perhaps the ultimate goal for advertisers, and one which is looking increasingly attainable, is tracking consumers across multiple devices. Being able to seamlessly pinpoint and target individual consumers as they move from a desktop to a mobile device and back again makes mobile advertising a powerful strand in a multichannel campaign, rather than a standalone effort.
James Barnes, StatusCake.com
James Barnes
Share this
More from StatusCake
When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering
4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,
James Barnes
March 25, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)
5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t
James Barnes
March 18, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)
6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff
James Barnes
March 11, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)
5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything
James Barnes
March 4, 2026
Alerting Is a Socio-Technical System
3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting
James Barnes
February 25, 2026
Designing Alerts for Action
3 min read In the first two posts of this series, we explored how alert noise emerges from design decisions, and why notification lists fail to create accountability when responsibility is unclear. There’s a deeper issue underneath both of those problems. Many alerting systems are designed without being clear about the outcome they’re meant to produce. When teams
James Barnes
February 18, 2026