In France, Most Mobile Ads Are Seen on Smartphones
France's growing tablet audience is also a powerful draw for advertisers
February 23, 2015
Smartphones still rule France’s mobile advertising landscape, according to mobile ad solutions provider InMobi. Its most recent “France Market Overview” reported that 70.9% of the ad impressions it served in Q4 2014 in France appeared on smartphone screens, while 28.9% appeared on tablets or other portable connected devices. Feature phones have effectively vanished from the scene, this research suggested: Older handsets accounted for a mere 0.2% of ad impressions.
While smartphone users are still the primary target for most mobile marketers, tablet users are increasingly coming into focus. InMobi noted that the share of impressions viewed on smartphones in France had fallen 7.7 percentage points quarter over quarter as the share viewed on tablets grew by the same amount.
Another big story in these results was the rise in ad impressions served to Android devices, at the expense of mobile devices running iOS. In a single quarter, the Apple iPhone’s share of InMobi impressions in France fell nearly 24%, and the iPad’s share dropped by 7.1%. Three Samsung models—the GT-I9505, GT-P5210 and SM-G900F—all posted gains in Q4 2014.
Finally, InMobi confirmed that the vast majority (80%) of the ad impressions it served in Q4 2014 in France were seen within apps, not on mobile websites—which displayed the remaining 20%. That could be a sobering statistic for brands weighing the relative merits of sites vs. apps.
Of course, much of the ad activity taking place in mobile apps belongs to just one category: social networks. According to a report from Syndicat des Régies Internet (SRI) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, produced in collaboration with the Union des Entreprises de Conseil et d’Achat Media (UDECAM), mobile display ad spending on social media in France jumped by 175% last year, to reach €60 million ($79.6 million). During the same period, outlays on other types of mobile display advertising rose an estimated 37%, to €82 million ($108.8 million).
By that reckoning, social networks claimed over 42% of all expenditure on mobile display ads in 2014—a dramatic sign of just how much France’s advertisers rely on social media to reach their audiences. And for consumers, apps are the most common way to check in at social sites.