If you ask the average person walking down the street, what is mobile advertising, the chances are you are going to hear the response “spam”. Of course, we are not talking about the canned precooked meat product that was popular in the 1940’s, but rather mobile spamming. Irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to large numbers of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, or spreading malware. So how can you avoid your mobile adverts from being ignored?
The first step in effective advertising, is to identify your specific audience. Next you can begin to provide them with messages that are relevant to their context and preferences. Unfortunately, too many choose to go down the route of bombarding all users with low quality, irrelevant ads, which can switch users off to the mobile advertising experience.Studies have shown that mobile advertising is most effective where users are carefully targeted and the message is provided in the right way, and at the right time.
One of the key challenges the industry is facing is the potential impact on brand safety. Placing a Brand in the wrong context is not only bad for the target audience, but could also jeopardies the brand image. Education around ad placement is an important and ongoing need, advertisements that are intrusive or which disturb users are seldom, if ever, successful. The key is to target users at a time when they are not already actively engaged, such as when an application is loading. Suitable placement is in understanding the behavioural patterns of users, and how they specifically use their mobiles. Knowing when and where to communicate via mobile advertising can be the difference between success and failure.
Further, the content of the messaging itself should not be underestimated when it comes to engaging an audience. Remember that taking an existing ad from one platform and simply resizing it to fit a mobile device is rarely a profitable approach. Far too often, adverts that appear on your smartphone were never actually designed for a mobile device.
The platform on which the advert is displayed is just as important as the advert itself. Advertisers must take this into consideration in order to achieve memorable engagement that really grabs the end user. They must recognise the benefits of mobile advertising and aim to utilise them fully. This is an exciting opportunity! A new dawn of advertising. Let’s be honest, too often, ads are boring, standardised and generic. By offering fun, engaging and compelling rich media content, it’s far more likely to provide an experience that will be memorable, instead of a one-off generic message that is likely to be ignored.
In a world of new and innovative mobile technology, users expect advertisements to keep pace with the rate of technological change and utilise innovative, interactive and creative means in order to engage them. Only by bucking these two trends can mobile advertisers expect to reach their audience with the kind of pinpoint accuracy they've come to expect.
In 2010, Steve Jobs said that “
mobile ads suck”, four years on and the industry is finally waking up to the reality of the power of mobile advertising. The mobile world has changed, with global advertising expenditure earmarked at
$41.9 bn by 2017 , with the UK the mobile value expected to reach close to
£1 billion this year, its in the moment that we can re-shape how mobile advertising in consumed, according to eMarketer.
By using applications, videos and even games, mobile advertisers are finding that they are able to become far more effective, and help their target audience to become far more engaged in the process! We can now be rest assured, that mobile ads no longer “suck”.
