I recently wrote a piece over on Android and Me about iVdopia, a mobile advertising platform which brought pre-app and in-app video advertising to the iPhone last year, and became available to Android developers recently. The reader response to the idea of actual commercials on their mobile devices was overwhelmingly negative, mirroring my own feelings on the matter, and I think developers and advertisers would be wise to look at other options.
On average mobile users are incredibly impatient (myself included) and they absolutely will not stand for a commercial or even an extra screen to jump through before accessing your app or website.
Advertisers need to realize that they can’t continue to apply the same tactics that worked for TV or even the “immobile internet.” Being bombarded by advertising is intolerable to the tech savvy market and mobile has been the last refuge, not requiring us to actively work to stop ads from invading our screens. With advanced mobile devices proliferating at an incredible rate in the last year and mobile ad click through rates allegedly soaring with them it looks like that panacea is about to end.
I think the new mobile users are going to be the interesting segment to watch here. They have no expectations regarding the mobile web as they have never really experienced it before. They will be entering the market this year with mobile devices that for the good and the bad can actually handle Flash. Are they going to chaff at ads forcing their way onto their new tiny screens or are they just going to accept it as the way things are? My bet would be on the former, but time will tell.
I would just like to see advertisers wake up to the way in which the mobile market differs from those that they have tried to tie into before.
I think one model is the understated attempt to get the eyes of the consumer. An example of this is something like Rainedout, a company that as its name suggests notifies people of rained out events by text message. They include brief “brought to you by” ads with links at the end of the text message. This is a service that people have signed up for and the ads do not seem at all intrusive on the service itself. Simple banner ads would fall into this category for me as well, just don’t use flashing video banners or anything that is profoundly distracting for the consumer. If people trust the site that they are visiting they will probably take a look at the ads from time to time. We users need to hold up our end of the bargain here as well and not just block all ads as a matter of course, a good website won’t overload you with ads and uniformly blocking everything will eventually cost us as content creators vanish.
The other model that gels well with mobile users is advertising that is distributed by social networks. Sharethrough is a more “web 2.0″ company that has managed to achieve success with this model. If you are active on the internet you have probably experienced their work. In essence what they do is take content from an advertiser and ensure that it goes viral. Its critical in their case that the advertiser has made something that people will want to see, but once that hurdle has been cleared they set to work and make sure it gets more views than the advertiser ever could have achieved simply hosting it on their website or releasing it to the web themselves. According to recent analytics mobile users spend over half their time on the internet on their social networks so this is a match made in heaven.
As our screens and our free time shrink our patience for advertising getting in our way on our devices shrinks with it. Upsetting and frustrating the consumer is not a successful marketing model so advertisers need to work with us and find ways to fade into the background (without disappearing completely) or to consistently create content that has its own merit in which case the mobile consumers will often do the proselytizing for them.
What advertising model do you think will find the greatest success in the mobile market without alienating consumers?
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