CHANTILLY, Va.—Most local advertisers around the country will hold steady on their ad spending and media allocations this year, a new BIA reveals.

The forecast, part of the newly released U.S. SAM Survey of Advertising and Marketing, projects that amusement parks, sports teams, movie theaters and other entertainment venues are the only advertisers that will spend slightly more this year. Retailers, service professionals and home/trade service advertisers are expected to maintain their ad spend.

When it comes to platforms, advertisers have expressed a willingness to bump up their ad spend on mobile and social.

“Over the past several years, our research indicates that advertisers are more focused on personalized, targeted communications, and they believe mobile and social deliver on important customer engagement KPIs,” said Celine Matthiessen, BIA's VP of Analysis and Insights and SAM study director.

The survey also revealed an important shift in the priorities of advertisers. It found advertisers are interested in more than basic demographic targeting; they want insight into the behavior of consumers as they make their path to a purchase.

Advertisers want to know the websites and social pages consumers have visited and their searches that have led to their buying products and services, the SAM survey said.

As a result, ad sellers have an obligation to show how their channel reaches the right customers throughout the buying process in a trackable manner, it said.

The area of location-targeted ads is the category of mobile with the greatest growth. According to the findings, just 13 percent of businesses surveyed said they were not spending money on mobile advertising, but planned to do so this year.

Across all business categories, 35.5 percent of businesses use mobile location-aware, while 24 percent use mobile search, the SAM survey revealed.

“Because businesses like the targeting (behavioral) opportunities that mobile and social offer, these platforms continue to show the largest signs of advertiser growth,” said Matthiessen.

The survey also found buyers of traditional media are “extremely comfortable” buying digital ads from their local sales person, “so sellers should be prepared to sell offers across multiple platforms,” she said.

Social and mobile media, email, video, display and SEO are the most popular digital ads purchased via traditional channels, the survey said.

Here’s what the BIA/Kelsey folks said today from CHANTILLY, VA.—A new BIA/Kelsey Industry Watch report explores one of the fastest growing areas of location-targeted media: mobile. According to BIA/Kelsey estimates, annual U.S. mobile ad spending will grow from $33 billion in 2016 to $72 billion by 2021, a 17 percent compound annual growth rate. The location-targeted portion of that overall mobile ad spend is projected to grow from $12.4 billion in 2016 to $32.4 billion in 2021. This growth translates to 38 percent of overall mobile ad revenues today, growing to 45 percent by 2021.

One of the biggest mobile success factors for local mobile is native thinking, which involves building content, apps and ads that fit the device’s unique form factor, rather than porting formats from legacy media. The smartphone’s location-tracking abilities and portability, combined with users’ transitory behavior, make location-targeted content a natural fit.

“The smartphone revolution turns ten this year, and we’ve come a long way,” said Mike Boland, chief analyst of BIA/Kelsey and author of the report, “Getting to $72 Billion: BIA/Kelsey’s Mobile Ad Revenue Forecast.”
“But many are far behind, still operating with a desktop mindset. They’ll be left behind the next era of mobile, defined by native-social, voice interfaces and multimedia, not banner ads and traditional search,” he said.

In addition to segmenting mobile ad spend by its locality, the report also reveals BIA/Kelsey’s estimates for each mobile ad format including search, traditional display, messaging, video and native-social. Search has long maintained a top position but is slowly losing share to emerging formats like native-social.

Native-social ads are expected to derive $10.2 billion in 2016 and grow to $24.2 billion in 2021. This growth stems from the format’s advantages, high performance and resulting demand. For example, mobile screens lack real estate for traditional top and side banner ads that ruled the desktop web. A vertically scrolling feed (a la news feed) conversely holds greater capacity for ad inventory.

The mobile forecast covered in the report mirrors BIA/Kelsey’s cross-media U.S. Local Advertising Forecast for 2017 that covers 12 media. The forecast defines location-targeted ads as those that are targeted based on a user’s location or include proximity-relevant content to trigger local offline conversions.