The past, present, and future of mobile ad formats

Mobile advertising has come a long way. While the first SMS message was sent in 1992, it took eight years before anyone cottoned on to its advertising potential, with the initial SMS advert sent out in 2000. Since then, and particularly since the birth of the iPhone in 2007, mobile advertising’s acceleration and the proliferation of ad formats has been staggering. With SMS, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) ads, and eye-catching in-app banners that watched as we blew stuff up with birds, ran through temples and surfed subways, mobile became the digital advertising medium.

With global mobile ad revenue reaching 276.21 billion U.S. dollars in 2020 (according to Statista), it’s the intimacy of smartphones and the multitude of available formats that has made them better advertising platforms than other media. Mobile ad formats are far from flawless, however. We know that almost 40% of global mobile inventory is not viewed by real people, while there is a persistent perception among parts of the industry that mobile advertising formats are harmful to user experience.