Mobile is the biggest channel for engagement, yet brands seem to limit their adspend to the social media apps. DT’s Jon Hudson speaks to Affiliate Leaders on why this is a missed opportunity.
Mobile advertising has somewhat become the elephant in the room. Connected TV (CTV), agentic AI, retail media and social media seem to dominate conversations on stage – it’s certainly true for every event I’ve been to this year.
Yet the one device we all look at the most – our mobile phones – is one the biggest channels for engagement, but those conversations seem to be reserved for the corridors only.
To address this, I spoke to Jon Hudson, senior vice president of global sales, at DT (formerly Digital Turbine) – a platform that connects advertisers, app developers and device partners across the mobile ecosystem.
“When brands and agencies think about mobile, they mostly think of investment going into a couple of channels – social media and YouTube,” explains Hudson, as we sit on one of the beachfront venues on the final day of Cannes Lions.
“What marketers are perhaps missing is how much time we all spend on our phone. I saw a recent stat around people using their phone 100 times per day… that’s 100 different moments. And everyone’s 100 moments are different, which means there’s a lot of fragmentation.”
Hudson believes AI is driving that fragmentation, which is “why there’s a missed opportunity”. Although he doesn’t think it’ll be a missed opportunity for long.
“If you just look at time spent on the mobile device, 90% of the time is spent within apps, and probably about 30% of that 90% is spent in social,” he says. “But that social element is flattening, people are spending less time on those platforms. So what we’re seeing is that people are missing that 60%, but they’re not quite sure how to access it. They’re not quite sure on the measurement.”
The gaming myth
There’s also the assumption the app channel is very gaming orientated and “they’re not sure if their audience is quite there”, notes Hudson, adding that DT’s data shows the audience is there and it varies “wildly”.
In fact, he claims that “some of these games like Solitaire, Match Three and Candy Crush, have more monthly users than Netflix”. But it’s not just about mobile games.
The global mobile in-app marketing scene is growing. AppsFlyer data shows that global marketing spend reached $109bn in 2025 – user acquisition accounted for $78bn in spend while remarketing reached $31bn.
User acquisition grew by 13% year-on-year (YoY), primarily driven by iOS which saw a 35% surge while Android remained flat at -1%.
Adspend across gaming grew by 3% YoY to $25bn; while non-gaming saw investment increase by 18% YoY to %53bn.
Non-gaming spend was led by shopping, which grew by 70%. Casino and gambling apps also saw a significant rise in growth in adspend for user acquisition, growing by 127% YoY.
Despite the channel’s growth, there is still a disconnect with brands often choosing to spend less of their marketing budget on in-app advertising. This, Hudson, attributes to “the infrastructure, the measurement and the way they buy media”, whether that’s via a media agency or in-house.
“Performance marketers are much more nimble,” he says, “so it’s no surprise for them to kind of go in first.”
He also points out that many brands have brought programmatic media buying in-house so “it will take time for them to move their infrastructure to support the data”.
And for brands that think they’ve covered mobile by investing in social media or YouTube, Hudson calls that a “very myopic” view and says they need to understand what is happening in this space.
“The best way to illustrate this is there was data recently brought out around the number of app store submissions that we saw in Q1 2026 – it’s up 60% YoY on both the iOS store and the Android Google Play Store,” he explains.
“For a mature market like the app store, which has been around for decades, that’s a pretty seismic shift, and AI is driving that in two ways. The first is it’s actually shrinking people’s attention onto the open internet because they’re getting answers directly in their search queries.
“But the impact it’s having on the app store is giving users the ability to develop an application, build a product, and release that app in the app store. With tools like AI, it has become much more efficient, and so that’s why you’re seeing more and more apps available on the store.
“Now, what that means is consumers are getting more and more options. They were already overloaded with options, and now they’re getting even more. So looking at mobile through the lens of social media and YouTube is not going to cover where your users are.”
In-app ads offer creativity and scale
Social media platforms like Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. Meta recently settled the landmark case in the US over the addictive design of its platforms and has called on its peers to follow in its footsteps to make changes.
It means consumer behaviour on these platforms is shifting, so “there is an opportunity for brands outside of those platforms which is much less crowded”, adds Hudson. It means brands can “convey their message about a product or service within an in-app environment in a much more creative way such as playable units or gamification”.
“If you compare that to something that’s very crowded, maybe even highly skippable, this is a great way to get their message across,” he notes, adding that “smart marketers are even looking at things like attention scores as a new way of tracking viewability”.
But the most exciting thing about in-app advertising for Hudson is the opportunity to scale it presents. Naturally the question that comes with that is ‘how can advertisers find their audience in this huge potential addressable market?’.
“That’s where picking the right platform and having the right testing framework matters,” says the VP, but warns that advertisers need to avoid coming to the table with a perception of where they think their audience is.
“What we’re seeing in a category like games, for example, is not always who you’d think it is. The people playing mobile games could be female heads of households or business directors playing social casino games as they want to bring a little bit of Las Vegas into their life each day, or they could be you know someone playing solitaire on a plane or a word game to help you know with their mental stimulation.
“The audience is so broad,” states Hudson. “That’s why in-app mobile advertising is a huge opportunity outside of traditional performance channels.”
But it begs the question, if mobile is the next frontier in adland, how can the conversation around it be moved from the corridors and on to the main stage?
Education on the “whole mobile industry” is needed, exclaims Hudson. But more than that, measurement needs to catch-up to how it’s been adopted for other channels and a “consistent framework”.
AI has been a catalyst for the mobile space and it is “probably the way to get the industry talking about it on the main stage”, he concludes.
