Mobile advertising is currently a buzz word, here on mobiForge and everywhere else. Hence, the meaning of the term "mobile marketing" has many interpretations. I'll narrow it down to just talk about banner ads on mobile portals for now… Lots of articles have been written , Gartner finds it interesting and lots of commercial companies are entering this business. Of course we all hate flashing,blinking,rotating and noisy ads on web sites, and I fear that we're gonna hate it even more on our mobile phones!
But not yet… Before we start to hate them, we will actually find them relevant…
A study performed by Usable products company shows exactly that. The reason why an "adified" search tool is providing more perceived relevance is that the quality and quantity of content indexed by crawlers is narrow and mostly newspapers and magazines. I mean, when you search for "Rent a car" you don't want a list of news articles describing the car the McCanns rented in Portugal, but you actually want information on how/where to rent a car NOW. Car rental companies, especially local ones, have not entered the mobile web yet and are lacking a mobile strategy. However, they might have bought an ad in an mobile ad network or bought sponsored links in a search engine. When this ad is shown in relation to the search result the perceived relevance of the search result increases.
I'm not an advertising guy my self, but I believe that mobile advertising, at this stage, is nothing but positive for the mobile internet! Today, mobile advertising provides relevance, quantity,attention and commercial interests to mobile internet. Quantity because behind every banner there must be a "landing page" and commercial interest because someone can make money.
So, this luxurious situation may be in a closing window of time… The mobile advertising might be just as annoying as we know web advertising is… I am afraid that will happen if the advertising companies redeploys their, sometimes aggressive, desktop-web strategy onto mobile web. However, if a mobile strategy is developed considering all the unique aspects of the mobile channel, I believe that the users positive perception of mobile ads will be long lived. So please, all of you out there… Don't think that the desktop-way will work on the mobile! No one have the correct answer here, but I believe we can say that "Do it any other way than the desktop-way", cuz that wont work! What strategy to choose is up to all you out there. mobiForge describes some ad networks while Fast argue that it is vital to control the advertising value chain. I tend to agree more with Fast considering you have the option of controlling the relevance of the ads presented.
To sum up, I believe the following questions should be input to a mobile ad strategy:
- Ad network or self-controlled value chain? or both? (Is your organization able to sell your own ad-space?)
- Are the unique capabilities of the mobile channel utilized?
- Are you using the same system for mobile as for web? (the red light should be blinking)
- How are the ads produced relevant?
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