Mobile marketing in 2024: Expert insights on what to expect

In this Q&A, the team at Remerge pick the brain of mobile marketing expert David Murphy (co-founder of Masterclassing and Mobile Marketing Magazine) to unlock this year's biggest developments.

The advent of mobile has broken the barriers between brands and consumers by putting an end to one-way broadcast messaging and facilitating a more intimate, multi-faceted means of two-way engagement. But where did it all begin, what’s next in mobile marketing and what can we expect from 2024?

We sat down with David Murphy, co-founder of Masterclassing and Mobile Marketing Magazine to get his take on the biggest developments in the mobile space and learn about the economics behind the changes. Next month, the Remerge team will also be discussing these topics with David in an upcoming episode of our Apptivate Podcast – so read the interview below and check out our other podcast episodes for a taste of what’s to come.

Hi David, what’s your background in the mobile marketing industry?

I started writing about the internet as a journalist back in 1995. Mobile emerged around 2002 and it was around that time I began getting work to write about the industry. Most recently, I was the editorial director and co-founder of Dot Media. The company was born out of Mobile Marketing Magazine, which I created as an online news, analysis and advice portal in November 2005.

What had the biggest impact on your work as a journalist in the mobile space?

Apple launched its first iPhone in 2007 and this sent shockwaves throughout the industry. The world never looked back. The App Store hit the market a year later and phones started to become the remote controls of our lives: your news, your TV, your jukebox, your camera. 

And it just evolved from there to the point we’re at now, where we’re on our phones all day (the average screen time for users around the world in 2023 was six and half hours). Marketers understand the power of apps and the money-making ability of games on mobile, which means there’s a stupid amount of competition to get an app discovered, downloaded and then used and reused – and not deleted. This has led to a mobile and app marketing lumascape of thousands of companies.

But for marketers, there’s still this challenge and this battle with every other app to get their own app downloaded, retained and used. So there’s a real need to stand out from the crowd and get app onboarding and ongoing user engagement right. According to research from AppsFlyer, global spending on app-install advertising is projected to hit $94.9bn by 2025 – a 20% increase from 2023. There are millions of apps fighting it out for users in the major app stores. 

Largely, the protagonists compete on a level playing field, competing for attention and visibility in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, but there is some other interesting stuff going on here in the form of alternative app stores and ad networks run by some of the big handset makers like Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, and Huawei. So with these, brands can advertise their apps in their own dedicated app stores, and they can also tap into Dynamic Preloads, where the first time a user takes the phone out of the box and fires it up, they are given the option to download a given app.

What other trends have you noticed? 

The incessant march of artificial intelligence (AI) and the challenge of harnessing it in a good way for creativity, data analysis and content creation. An analysis by app marketing analytics platform App Radar found that since the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022, AI chat apps have been downloaded 23.6 million times from the Google Play Store. 

We see lots of vendors adding AI capabilities to their platforms. For digital marketers, mobile marketers and app marketers, 2024 will be a time of more disruption, more upheaval, more challenges. But the great thing is, wherever there’s a problem in digital marketing, just as in any other sector, there’s someone who sees a great way to make a ton of money and build a great business by providing a solution. 

Anything else mobile marketers should look out for in 2024? 

Adjust said that in mobile marketing alone, ad fraud cost marketers over $80bn in 2022 and for 2023, the final number is expected to be around the $100bn mark. Ad fraud has been an issue in mobile ever since ads first appeared – and it’s not going away. It will continue to be an issue in 2024, and we’ll continue to see companies like TrafficGuard, Kochava and Lunio releasing and evolving solutions to combat it.

Follow Remerge’s Apptivate podcast now for great mobile marketing tips from David Murphy in episode 175 – dropping 7 February, 2024. The episode will be hosted by Maria Lannon, Remerge’s VP of sales and account management.