A new survey into mobile ad spending by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers has showed that the UK shunned the market trends for last year by increasing at a rate of 99.2% year on year to £28.6m.

The IAB made the choice to include mobile advertising after 3 mobile, O2, Orange, T-mobile and Vodafone signed up to become members. The survey includes mobile media spends but not SMS or MMS production and delivery costs.

Mobile display advertising, which encompasses banners, text links, tenancies pre-post roll and in-game, accounts for 49.8% of all mobile advertising spend and was worth £14.2m over the last year. Paid-for search advertising was worth £14.4m which contributed to 50.2% of all mobile ad spends.

The IAB is undertaking an investigation into the effectiveness of mobile advertising with the view to launching a ‘how to’ guide for marketers, on briefing, planning and executive campaigns. There is also a need to advise these marketers of paid-for search that they are contributing to these services, as many paid-for search marketers are unaware that they are actually using mobile ads in their paid-for search campaign, this is not down to some kind of clandestine approach from the companies selling the ads, but more likely down to the marketers understanding of the parameters of their search campaigns.

Jon Mew, IAB Head of Mobile, said that: “This study is a UK first and means the IAB can accurately prove and track how much marketers are spending on mobile ads. The sector is in its infancy but is considerably bigger than the market was expecting. Thanks to these landmark figures we know the real value of the mobile advertising industry, and will now be able to chart the medium’s growth with confidence.”