Innovative mobile ads are capable of delivering big results on the small screens of smartphones and tablets. Traditional banner ads have never been well-suited to mobile, but the industry is developing new forms of advertising that eschew the easily ignored banner for immersive experiences that utilize the full power and functionality of a mobile device. The results are ads that are interactive, engaging, and often do not even look or feel like ads.
Several industry leaders shared their mobile success stories and outlined an emerging set of best practices at the June 18 IAB round table event Dispatches from the Leading Edge of Mobile Creative, in San Francisco. These media, ad technology, research, and creative professionals demonstrated successful strategies for engaging consumers on smartphones and tablets, and addressed the challenges of mobile device fragmentation, data limitation, and the shorter attention span of mobile consumers.
A major, overarching takeaway is that not all mobile use is equal. Consumers use smartphones in vastly different ways than they use tablets, at different times of day, and for different purposes. Joline McGoldrick, Vice President, Research, Millward Brown Digital, addressed this important distinction in an introductory overview on mobile creative norms and best practices.
Mobile Branding Best Practices
Millward Brown’s research shows smartphone and tablet ads share some common strengths. Exposure to mobile advertisements outperforms desktop advertisements in terms of several important brand metrics like awareness, favorability, and purchase intent. But measuring conversions is a trickier proposition in mobile advertising, depending on the product or brand being advertised.
“The average mobile ad garners only 2.2 seconds of visual attention,” Ms. McGoldrick noted. She detailed a few best practices for visually compelling mobile ads: Adding visual elements beyond a simple product shot, keeping messages to seven or fewer words, making sure to name the brand, and for non-photographic assets, using bold and simple color schemes.
She encouraged mobile advertisers to “balance the tangible value offered with the degree of intrusion.” That is to say, audiences notice that mobile ads consume their data and disrupt their user experience. The most effective mobile ads give the consumer something back, such as deals or coupons, free tools, and interest-based information like recipes or game scores.
Sponsored Listening and Sponsored Stations
Alan Chappell, Creative Director, Advertising and Director, Product Design, New Products, Pandora, detailed how Pandora uses its big data insights and analytics to enable innovative mobile ad products like sponsored listening and branded stations, which match advertisers with the listener demographics they desire. “It’s the right listener, the right time, the right content,” Mr. Chappell said. “We’re not interrupting [users’] listening, we’re looking for some way to extend their content,” he explained, pointing out how Pandora uses interstitials, narrators, and brand awareness messages within the actual station experience.
Native and Rewarded Video
Two speakers discussed tactics for video on mobile. Nadine Jarrard, VP, Sales-West, Opera Mediaworks, discussed the qualities video ads should have to break through on mobile. Opera Mediaworks delivers video ad formats that load automatically without buffering, and integrate seamlessly into the content.
Video ads within a content feed have worked well for social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Vine. As other publishers reformat their mobile content to be a feed-based experience, Opera Mediaworks has established a native video project to meet the increased demand for in-feed video ads and has also produced best practices for this video including keeping in-feed video ads under 15 seconds, preferably fewer than 10 seconds. Additional recommendations include grabbing viewer attention immediately with quick cuts and bold text, and reducing the importance of sound.
Mobile advertising firm Supersonic discussed a rewarded video campaign for the film Hercules that invited the users to press play and watch the trailer. “Let’s make [the ad experience] more invitational versus making it invasive,” said Dock Kim, VP, Ad Sales, Mobile User Acquisition and Growth, Supersonic, explaining the strategy. This strategy delivered an impressive 91 percent completion rate of the trailer, and had the unexpected benefit of a 20 percent click-through rate to the Fandango website after users had watched the video.
Custom Advertising
Mobile advertising platform Tapjoy showed off a gamified mobile ad campaign they created for an automobile brand. Their “Catch the Legend” game, like many Tapjoy game-based ads, was created specifically for the brand—though this strategy can be time-consuming and risky.
“If you’re building a custom ad, you’re always throwing a Hail Mary to a certain extent,” said Zach Moore, Director of Design, Tapjoy. He noted that user testing needs to be rigorous and timelines can often be exceedingly limited. However, such a campaign has novelty and memorability, and can garner very high engagement rates.
Performance Analysis of Creative
While the capabilities needed to build and deliver a mobile campaign are often compartmentalized, integrating those abilities can yield clear benefits. “It sounds almost like a joke,” said Cameron V. Peebles, Vice President of Marketing, Airpush, explaining his company’s Performance Creative Initiative. “What would happen if you locked a data scientist, a designer and a media buyer in a room?” Airpush designed a mobile social campaign for Stand Up to Cancer that drove significant brand impact for the charity—proof that mobile isn’t just a direct response medium.
Key Takeaways
Effective mobile ads don’t get in the consumer’s way. They are non-intrusive, and don’t prevent the consumer from getting to their desired mobile web experience. Good mobile ads should not prevent the consumer from using their mobile device. Mobile advertising must take into consideration how customers choose to behave on their particular device—not how the brand wants them to behave.
The panel addressed some of mobile’s ongoing complexity: Fragmentation within and across major operating systems; and delivery across different screen sizes and network speeds all require technical skills different from the desktop world.
The speakers also reflected on the role of standard ad formats in mobile. Several noted that standards can impede innovation, especially when brands want new, never-seen-before experiences. Joe Laszlo, IAB Senior Director and moderator of the session, emphasized that IAB today thinks about digital advertising in terms of three categories: Concept ads—big, beautiful, often custom brand ads; content ads—ads that fit into a content feed, like Opera’s in-feed video formats; and commerce ads—direct response ads delivered at scale, with simple calls to action. Old-school IAB standard ad units work well for commerce ads, but new types of ad standards are needed for concept and content ads, and the IAB is working on conceptualizing these.
Presenters were unanimous that advertisers must replace their dependence on clicks with an increasingly wide range of success metrics—metrics that reflect how users consume information on mobile devices.
“Let’s move away from click-through rates, and let’s look closer at engagement rates,” Ms. Jarrard advised. She recommends “ad experiences that create these ‘thumb-stopping moments.’ It’s about what is going to create that moment where it’s going to force the user to stop and really engage with your ad.”
The mobile ad campaigns that create these thumb-stopping moments are the campaigns that will really earn a thumbs-up from tablet and smartphone consumers.