Despite huge growth in the mobile advertising market, the cash pumped into it is dwarved by TV spend.

This gap accounts for the amount of time the industry's spending trying to re-educate Madison Avenue about its reach.

It's also the thinking behind AdColony's recent research study. Working with Nielsen, the video ad specialist has been checking the power of what it calls cross-screen campaigns.

All eyes everywhere

The argument goes that many people watching TV are simultanteously interacting with their smartphones or tablets, hence brands need to be running ad campaign on TV and mobile.

To prove this, Nielsen set up an experiment during which consumers were asked to watch a 30 minutes TV show and engage with mobile and tablet devices.

During the TV show, a 15 second ad for Universal Studio's movie Contraband appeared in the commercial break, while one group also saw a 15 second spot served using AdColony's Instant-Play HD video ad technology on iPhones and iPads.

Interest in buying tickets for the film was 18 percent for the TV-only group but 31 percent for the cross-screen viewers, up 72 percent.

Synergetic impact

Digging down further into the results: brand recall for the movie was 69 percent higher for cross-screen viewers at 93 percent; cross-screen viewers also were 160 percent more likely to recommend the movie to a friend; while 22 percent of them said intended to search for the film online, compared to just 4 percent for the control group.

"To-date, mobile has been the wild, wild west for advertisers," said AdColony's CEO Will Kassoy.

"This research was designed to assess the incremental impact of complementing TV with mobile video advertising, and measured key brand metrics including recall, purchase intent, brand favourability and desire to search.

"With upwards of 80 percent of consumers multi-tasking while they are watching TV, a cross-screen video advertising strategy is paramount."