With it having been reported that more than 63% of website traffic in 2025 comes via mobile devices, and some 96.3% of Internet users access the Internet using a mobile phone, it is safe to say that mobile-first brands aren’t merely “trendy” or “having a moment”.
Instead, mobile-first brands are solidly mainstream. Moreover, the growth of many of them has been very much furthered by the ever-heightening sophistication of paid media.
Before we proceed, though, let’s provide a reminder of what each of these terms refers to:
- A “mobile-first” brand is a brand that makes mobile users its priority when it is designing and implementing its products, services, and marketing campaigns. So, such a brand will typically focus mainly on providing its target customers with an excellent mobile experience, which is subsequently built upon for other devices.
- “Paid media” is any form of advertising where money needs to be invested in order to promote a brand, product, or service. So, the term can encompass the likes of traditional TV and print advertising, but also such more recently developed methods as website banner ads, advertising on Facebook, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines like Google.
So, What Transformations Have Been Seen in Paid Media for Mobile-First Brands?
If you are a key decision-maker for a mobile-first brand, you may already be highly aware of how powerful paid media can be as a means of quickly drawing the attention of the right people to organisations, products, and services like yours.
However, it is precisely because of this power, that you should be keeping your knowledge up to date when it comes to the constant shifts in paid media for such businesses.
Here are a few examples of those recent evolutions:
- A movement towards short-form video ads. You might have come across statistics like the one from Hootsuite, that 73% of consumers prefer short-form videos for learning about products and services. The most successful mobile-first brands recognise this, which is why they have recently tended to tap into highly compelling and memorable short video formats.
- The rise of social commerce and in-app advertising. Social commerce has become ever-more of a “standard”, shoppers feeling increasingly comfortable with buying products directly through social platforms. Alongside this, we have seen the likes of Instagram and TikTok begin to offer shoppable ads, which incorporate brand product ranges directly into the posts or stories that consumers see.
- Increasingly AI-oriented, personalised, and data-driven PPC marketing. The most impactful pay-per-click approach for marketing for mobile-first brands in 2025, tends to greatly draw upon artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. This enables brands to automate such tasks as bidding, keyword research, and the optimisation of campaigns.
- An ever-greater emphasis on mobile-optimised formats and content. The leading mobile-first brands relentlessly seek to provide their target audiences with the most engaging and authentic content where those audiences are – which, of course, is frequently on mobile. Such users appreciate immersive, short-form experiences that feel like natural, intuitive elements of the broader mobile app ecosystem. This has helped spur the emergence of such ad formats as native in-app adverts, brief vertical videos, and interactive stories.
Is Your Mobile-First Brand Using Paid Media in The Most Engaging Ways?
Mobile consumption across the world continues to grow, alongside constant evolutions in customer preferences. This means it is of the utmost performance for mobile-first brands to develop holistic paid media campaigns that prioritise engagement.
If your own mobile-first brand is able to achieve this, it will be excellently placed to stake out – and preserve – a competitive advantage in an ever-changing digital landscape.