With public’s immense love for social media and smartphones, it’s no surprise that mobile advertising is becoming the prime choice of organizations across the globe.  In the United States, campaigns via mobility tech are fast rising, especially for local businesses. A huge portion of this marketing mania comes from daily deals, which work on location and customers’ data.  But this is just a fraction of the whole mobile advertising victory.  The radius of influence is ascending, reaching into the landscape of travel enterprise—an industry that is still yet to fully unleash its potential.

When you have social media and smartphones as your campaign collateral, you are like a battalion of a million armed soldiers who will repel any results, but will triumph in the end.  We have observed how travel agencies and companies have utilized social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to launch promotions, increase site traffic and accommodate trip bookings.

Travel advertising on-the-go

The latest Millennial Media SMART report for July shows that the gravity of mobile advertising has attracted the travel industry to its core.  With summer being a season of vacation and beach holidays, different facets of travel campaigns saw positive thrusts.

Not surprisingly, the travel industry was prepared with long-term goals of sustaining ads in-market, taking up about 79% of Millennial Media’s ads overall.  Engagement was key, so there was a focus on app downloads as well.  These downloads accounted for about 86% of all activity within the mobile traveler’s sphere, indicating the growing level of interest apps have with consumers.  Apps are services themselves, and can provide a tremendous benefit to travelers, if they’re leveraged properly.  Overall, it’s the hotel and resort brands that drove the most mobile ad activity, accounting for over 60% of this market.

While mobile apps can provide services, mobile ads are also heavily focused on deals and discounts.  This is a major incentive for consumers, and the travel industry is developing campaign strategies accordingly.  Promotions of this sort represented 14% of ad activity in this segment, marking an interesting combination of services and incentives being extended to consumers.

Parents were specific demographic targets for travel ads and promotions, and this leaks into other advertising verticals as well.  Deals and promotions targeted moms, who often keep the family on budget and make a large portion of the family decisions.  Other industries such as the automative sector took advantage of summer road warriors with a family in-tow, throwing out test-drive ads to dads.

Mobile ad spending is continuously and rapidly soaring. As consumers prefer to use their mobile phones to perform the most basic to more complex tasks every single day, from shopping, banking and travel-booking, to something as serious as addressing issues on autism, mobile advertising will see bigger gains in the next few months and could dominate the entire market in no time.