Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

There has been an explosion in purpose-driven brand communication the last few years.

As Matthew Gardner at Droga5 put it, “Because of the challenge for people’s attention, purpose is the only thing that will get brands to break through. This is not a trend but more of an imperative and should be top of mind for every company.

”When every brand team jumps on the purpose bandwagon, however, the resulting communication can feel pretty shallow. There’s a risk of brands completely overstating why they exist. Particularly when their actual motivation is to capture consumer attention, brand purpose can come across as “ad-deep.” It starts to feel like just one more tick-box on a creative brief....

It’s been a year of milestones for mobile, and it appears that another threshold will be reached this year: mobile devices are close to capturing the majority share of US online ad revenues, according to the latest revenue report [pdf] from the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Indeed, mobile devices accounted for 47% share of online ad revenues in the first half of this year.

That’s a huge jump from 30% share of revenues during the first half of 2015. With mobile advertising growing at a rapid pace – up 89% year-over-year in H1 – it’s not hard to imagine that they’ll claim a majority of online ad revenues by year’s end.

Overall, online ad revenues increased by 19.1% year-over-year during H1 to $32.7 billion, though growth was not distributed evenly across formats:

- Desktop search spend decreased by 12%; share of total spend declined to 27%;

- Mobile search spend more than doubled (a 105% increase)....