A study by Millennial Media finds that automotive brands are heavily investing in bolstering their mobile Web presence.   

Mobile Web sites and applications created by automotive brands are content rich and enable customers to conduct research, identify retail promotions, find a local dealership and schedule vehicle service appointments. Automotive brands who spend on their mobile Web sites and applications experienced a 623 percent growth year-over-year, Millennial Media found.

?The retail and automotive verticals dramatically increased their spend on mobile during their critical holiday and year-end selling seasons to effectively reach their target consumer,? said Mack McKelvey, senior vice president of marketing at Millennial Media, Baltimore, MD.

Millennial?s landscape
Millennial Media continues to reach more than eight out of 10 ? or 79 million of the nearly 91 million ? mobile Web users, as reported by Nielsen.

Year-over-year comparisons show that mobile campaigns in the last year have been more effective in capturing consumer attention and educating them, per Millennial.  

According to Millennial, 35 percent of campaigns on its network drove to a custom landing page.

Additionally, social media accounted for 14 percent of the campaign actions on Millennial Media?s network in the fourth quarter. 

Consumer packaged goods brands used their social media presence to drive awareness of their new product launches.

?We saw many advertisers become more savvy in the fourth quarter by utilizing a broad array of available campaign actions ? including placing a call, subscribing to a newsletter, watching a video, finding a store location, and promoting a special offer ? to achieve their holiday campaign objectives,? Ms. McKelvey said.

?This trend indicates that many brands are becoming more familiar with mobile and exploring deeper engagement options for their campaigns,? she said.

The report shows that targeted audience campaigns, which leveraged demographic and behavioral targeting parameters, continued to resonate with advertisers in the fourth quarter with 43 percent of advertisers? campaigns leveraging these methods.

Millennial found that during the holiday season, multiple carrier brands and device manufacturers doubled their mobile buys and used broad and targeted reach strategies to raise awareness of new smartphones, including Windows Phone 7.

In addition, the report found that banking brands used mobile to promote new services and drive application downloads.

Insurance advertisers used mobile as a post-click campaign action to drive lead generation.

?We ranked the top ten mobile ad verticals by spend in the fourth quarter and looked at year-over-year revenue growth across these top verticals,? Ms. McKelvey said. ?Six of the top 100 mobile ad verticals experienced explosive triple-digit growth.