Amazon, Toyota and Google had more unique mobile ads than any other brands between July 2012 and March 2013, making them the top three biggest mobile advertisers, according to a new report from Competitrack.

The report, Monitoring Our Mobile Future, found that nearly every major advertiser in the country is using or testing mobile advertising and activity levels are continuing to grow. More specifically, 94 out of the top 100 U.S. advertisers have run mobile ads in the last nine months.

?We've monitored over 2,700 leading national and regional advertisers in the 15 months since we began tracking mobile advertising, including 94 of the top 100 advertisers, and the number of advertisers running mobile ads in a given month has grown dramatically during that time,? said Ginny Tuckman, president of Competitrack, New York.

?For example, we observed mobile ad activity by over 1,000 advertisers in May 2013 vs. just 155 advertisers in the same month a year ago,? she said.

?And ad volumes - unique breaking creative executions - are increasing steadily. We captured over 3 times as many new ads in May 2013 as we did in May 2012.?

Wide adoption
Filling out the top ten most active brands in mobile advertising are Verizon, AT&T, Microsoft, Bank of America, Home Depot, Progressive Insurance and Target.

The shift toward mobile is not relegated to small brands. Competitrack also found that 64 percent of the top 1,000 brands have run mobile ads.

The report analyzes mobile advertising use by more than 2,700 leading national and regional advertisers. It is based on nearly 20,000 ads across iOS and Android phones and tablets.

By industry, the most mobile advertising is coming out of retail, entertainment and media, technology, travel and tourism as well as automotive.

Mobile best practices
The report also finds that advertisers are doing a good job of creating unique content for mobile ads, with 85 percent of the ads in Competitrack?s archives created specifically for mobile devices rather than being repurposed from other media.

With the use case for mobile often very different than for other channels, these results show that brands are embracing mobile best practices.

?It's clear from the ads we're capturing that advertisers are increasingly integrating mobile advertising in their marketing plans, with cross-media campaigns increasingly including mobile executions,? Ms. Tuckman said.

?Finally, though this is an anecdotal observation, it seems that as advertisers are more fully adopting mobile, they're producing more imaginative and interactive creatives - both the ads themselves and the landing pages they lead to,? she said.

?We're seeing many more animated and video ads than when we started, and many landing pages well tailored to the devices they're viewed in.?

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York