A new report from digital marketing research firm InsightExpress has revealed that when compared with online norms in ad campaigns, mobile campaign norms exhibit significantly higher response in terms of unaided awareness, aided awareness, ad awareness, and message association.

The study used norms developed in online ad testing as a benchmark to draw conclusions around the performance of advertising on mobile devices. InsightExpress compared the two using InsightNorms, the company's normative database containing over one thousand online ad effectiveness campaigns and over one hundred mobile ad effectiveness campaigns. Mobile InsightNorms are based on InsightExpress' flagship mobile brand effectiveness solution, Mobile AdInsights, which employs a test/control design to measure the brand impact of mobile advertising campaigns.

InsightExpress says that a comparison of three different mobile media types (Mobile Internet, SMS and Mobile video) shows clearly that the mobile Internet is the current powerhouse. Such campaigns resulted in increases of 9 percentage points for unaided awareness, 9 percentage points for aided awareness and 24 percentage points for ad awareness.

Specifically, InsightExpress found mobile campaign norms were 4.5 to 5 times higher than online norms against measures of unaided awareness, aided awareness, ad awareness, message association, brand favourability and purchase intent.

The report also shows that mobile video is still emerging, and shows campaign impact on par with SMS across most key brand metrics. The channel drove especially strong results against brand favourability. With an increase of 13 percentage points, compared to 12 percentage points for Mobile Internet and 7 percentage points for SMS, mobile video is demonstrating promise as a way to move the important brand favourability measure. Mobile Entertainment Purchase Intent effect is 4 times higher than online Entertainment Intent.

"Online campaigns continue to offer exceptional reach, flexibility and variety," commented Joy Liuzzo, Senior Director of Marketing & Mobile Research at InsightExpress. "However, the high levels of engagement, the explosion in technical capabilities, low levels of clutter and the novelty of mobile advertising all likely contribute to increased brand impact."