Advertisements – like them or hate them, but you cannot ignore them. Be it your Newspaper in the morning, Billboards while commuting, TV or Radio; the advertisements have been a part of our lives for long. In the early 90s internet (desktop) ads took place, which added the much needed element of interactivity to the ads.
As the mobile phones accessing internet proliferated, online ads came along. In this article, I want to share the benefits of mobile advertisement to the advertisers and content publishers, and how they can make the most out of it.
Advertisers: Advertisers are able to clearly see their ROI from spending on Mobile Ads as they can now target and re-target their messaging to more exact set of audience at more accurately defined locations. While ad effectiveness measurement have been a great puzzle with traditional modes, mobile ad tech companies offer a wealth of data that the brand managers can use to drive much higher engagement with their audiences the world over.
The clear edge that Mobile offers over any other advertising mode is its up, close & personal relation with the users. While the users can easily ignore an arbitrary ad on TV, when the contextual ad is served on their most personal mobile screens, they have a greater likeliness of engaging with it. Additionally, with the ever innovative ad formats like audio, video and push notification ads, the user engagement is further increased.
The key to make your mobile ads more effective is to be more creative with your ad formats and having different versions of your messaging suited to different audience segments. Advertisers can do this by working with their mobile ad campaign manager to serve different versions, ad formats and creatives for the same messaging, and choose to run their ad on the most relevant publisher inventory. Advertisers can access ad campaign analytics (available from your mobile advertising company or third party) tools to gauge the effectiveness of their ads and tweak their mobile ad campaigns to the optimal audience engagement rates.
Content Publishers: Mobile as a medium has almost created a new bunch of content publishers. A college going student makes a mobile app, gets great downloads and becomes an overnight star!! At its very core, it’s the creative people who originate a great content and want to popularize and monetize it in that order. Today apps have become the preferred way to consume content of all types; I prefer to call it Appification. It (Appification) is the easiest way to reach millions of users worldwide, and mobile advertising fuels your monetizing aspirations.
Having great app content is just a basic eligibility to succeed; the content publisher has to be clear about promoting their app in the right channels like blogs, app discovery platforms and app marketplaces. Additionally, they can run cost per install campaigns with mobile ad networks and instantly reach millions of users. Once the publisher gets a decent number of downloads, monetization strategy needs to be in place to make the most out of it. A good (and safe) app monetization strategy is to ensure ads are as relevant to your content type as possible and not over intrusive that it repels the user. Publishers can ensure appropriate frequency of ads on their content and constantly monitor user feedbacks/ downloads / active users to keep their monetization in sync with good user experience.
What it means for the consumers?
Finally you can expect ads that actually help you find something you might be interested in more quickly, in a much better and entertaining way. Consumers will get to choose the kind of ads they want to engage with in the most non-intrusive way. So the good news is that consumer remains the king!!