• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, October 5, 2015

Mobile will account for 70% of the programmatic display market by next year, per eMarketer.

According to a recent Millennial Media survey, expenditure on mobile programmatic has also led to increased investment in rich media ad formats with 40% investing in native ads, 64% in rich media and 74% in mobile video.

The reasons for all that growth include the global market for smartphones, as well as the ease and convenience of electronic buying.

While 33% of marketers see mobile as the channel with the most opportunity for programmatic advertising, according to a recent IAB report, only 27% of marketers surveyed had actually purchased mobile ads programmatically.  

But the real promise of mobile programmatic lies in the data. Geo-location, mobile Web behavioral data, login data, all the things that make mobile an extremely personal experience also make programmatic an extremely attractive option for advertisers.

However, the intimate nature of mobile advertising also has well-documented side effects.

“Our early campaigns show that there’s a direct correlation between creative user experience and conversion rates,” said Paul Dolan, General Manager, Light Reaction. Light Reaction, which formed earlier this year, is a mobile-first performance-based branch of programmatic tech platform Xaxis.

A bad user experience on a smartphone can have a negative effect on branding efforts. User’s fractured attention spans on phones require even more data to understand when they’re actually paying attention.

The promise of mobile programmatic hasn’t fully been realized yet, but marketers are starting to get wise to it. Some analysts even predict that all impressions will be served programmatically in the distant future, regardless of platform.