With the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards Ceremony taking place in London this evening, Alistair Hill, CEO of On Device Research considers what effectiveness is, and what it isn't.

Brands advertise to make money. There is little doubt in this fact. When stripped of the complexities involved in strategic media plans and award winning creative, one simple truth remains: brands invest in advertising to make a positive impact on their bottom line.

While this is the purest measure of effectiveness, analysing results in terms of sales impact is often easier said than done. There is a considerable time lag between an ad campaign and its success (or lack off) being realised. Digital marketers need therefore to look for precursors of effectiveness: metrics that correlate with, and give an early indication of sales, to gain a faster read on the effectiveness of campaigns.

On Device Research has today released findings from the latest wave of its Path to Purchase tracker which reveal that a quarter of KSA smartphone owners claim to visit shopping centres less than they did a year ago in the face of increased usage of online shopping services and on-demand shopping apps.

Emerging markets and multi-country survey company On Device Research has increased its mobile survey guidelines to 50 questions; new question types, improved device and network connectivity speeds and increased consumer acceptance have allowed more questions to fit into On Device Research’s 20 minutes mobile survey recommendation.

Meb Gafur, June 2016

Mobile is the most reliable method for surveying both emerging and developed markets since it:

• Delivers more representative samples than desktop recruited surveys
• It is more accurate than face to face when compared to real world sales data

On Device Research recently conducted “research on research” analysis of mobile surveys’ ability to gain representative data from across the world. In order to get a good geographic spread we analysed data from surveys in the UK, India, Malaysia and South Africa.

By Matthew Dodd, MD Global Media Effectiveness, On Device Research

Last month I looked at how important emotion was to building top of mind brand awareness. This month I wanted to share with you the advertiser categories that are making the most from their in-app investments across the broader ad effectiveness funnel.

By Matthew Dodd, MD Global Media Effectiveness, On Device Research

What is the DNA of a top performing mobile creative? In order to answer this question we delved into our 100 study (30,000 survey) normative database. The campaigns ran across a plethora of mobile DSPs, advertiser categories and formats.

By Matthew Dodd, MD Global Media Effectiveness, On Device Research

We were asked by one of the UK’s leading advertisers to investigate their Q4 mobile campaign. They wanted to better understand not only how many people saw their campaign, but also to assess how well it delivered against its key demographic targets.

On Device Research recommends that mobile surveys should be on average 10 to 15 minutes long.

On Device Research have carried out over 30 million surveys and over this time it has been seen repeatedly how mobile surveys can produce accurate, reliable, high quality data. But it's also become clear that when it comes to the length of surveys, size isn't always everything.

IAB commissioned a Global Consumer Survey looking into how, when and why people around the world are viewing video on the small screen in their pockets, their mobile. On Device Research surveyed 5,000 smartphone users in 24 countries across Europe, Latin America, the Asia-Pacific region and South Africa.

We've been in the mobile research game for 5 years now and while we've grown sizeably (now with 3 global offices) we're still striving to take mobile research mainstream. Throwing it to our audience at MRMW Singapore, we asked our fellow researchers what they felt were the biggest barriers for mobile research.