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Are marketers ready to pour serious money into tablet advertising?

As mobile spend continues to grow, marketers are upping their investments in ad formats made specifically for tablets that take advantage of a bigger screen size and interactive elements such as video and rich media. However, there are still significant challenges as new devices and form factors hit the market.

The tablet has proved to be a hit for consumers, but is still a fairly nascent advertising medium for marketers. Although forecasts point to tablet-specific advertising only increasing, some marketers are still unsure of where they should be placing their bets with tablets.

?We're expected to see mobile ad spend eclipse the $7 billion mark in 2013, which is up from just over $4 billion in 2012, according to a recent eMarketer report I've seen,? said Ken Burbary, chief digital officer of Campbell Ewald, Warren, MI.

?Now, that's combined ad spend across mobile phones and tablets, but significant growth nonetheless,? he said.

?As marketers are learning the differences between how consumers use mobile phones versus tablets, they have been able to evolve and refine their tablet marketing and advertising options to achieve greater efficiency and returns.?

Continued mobile spend
Consumers continue to devour content across multiple screens, with the tablet swapping out the traditional PC as the primary way that some consumers access content.

In fact, new research from Ooyala found that tablet and mobile video share grew by 19 percent during the first quarter of 2013.

And consumers are not simply snacking on tablet and smartphone video anymore. Mobile and tablet users spent half of their online viewing time during the first quarter of 2013 with long-form videos, per Ooyala's findings.

Moreover, 25 percent of total tablet watching was spent with content that was longer than 60 minutes.

As more content consumption takes place on mobile devices, the challenge for marketers is to find ways to seamlessly inject advertising into videos and content that are not an interruption to users.

Big spenders
To capitalize on the increased mobile spend, some marketers are debuting new premium-priced ad units.

For example, Millennial Media recently introduced a new suite of mobile ad products for smartphones and tablets.

The company has offered mobile video services to clients in the past, but what makes the new ad formats different is that content is geared towards being created specifically for the mobile ads.

For instance, one new product lets marketers wrap rich media around a video player to line up animations with specific parts of a video.

Another ad unit lets consumers toggle between different videos that are embedded into an ad unit as a way for consumers to look at more content.

It is no surprise that marketers increasingly want to incorporate video into their mobile campaigns, but simply repurposing video content from elsewhere does not cut it nowadays.

?Decades of TV advertising has shown that video is incredibly powerful, and this is true in mobile as well,? said Marcus Startzel, chief revenue officer of Millennial Media, Baltimore, MD.

?What is so unique about mobile, however, is that brands can go now go one step deeper, and build on their video ads to drive additional engagement. Having consumers physically interact with video content is something that is unavailable in any other medium, and this is a tremendous opportunity for advertisers.?

Advertisers using the product have not yet been named, but campaigns will begin rolling out this month, according to Millennial Media.

The ad network declined to comment on the specific prices of the ads, but did say that they will be more expensive than standard video units.

New challenges
The growth of bigger ad units with tablets also brings up a number of new challenges for marketers around measurement and

Apple?s iPad still brings in the lion's share of market share, but other tablets such as Android?s Kindle Fire and Samsung?s Galaxy Tab are also picking up with consumers.

Therefore, marketers should not be lumping tablet users into one bucket.

?There are multiple tablet operating systems ? iOS, multiple variants of Android, Windows and BlackBerry ? as well as form factors and screen sizes,? Mr. Burbary said.

?Each of these factors makes life harder for marketers seeking to reach their tablet audience, he said.

?It reminds me of the early days of the Web, when lack of Web standards and competing browser types caused similar complexity and problems for brand marketers. The mobile revolution makes those days' problems look simplistic in comparison.?

Cross-scale reach
As more tablet devices come onto the scene, the market is increasingly becoming more fragmented, which again could hold some marketers back from investing substantial amounts of money into tablet advertising.

According to Steven Kritzman, senior vice president of advertising sales at Pandora, Oakland, CA, the key to tablet advertising is cross-platform campaigns.

?The tablet is hitting true scale, though there are a handful of publishers that have it on a meaningful level,? Mr. Kritzman said.

?It's about a mobility mindset and not necessarily the device the consumer is tethered to,? he said. ?We currently do it with Web and mobile, and tablet is the next natural extension.?

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York