This post is one of a series about the immediate future for mobile, which is based on the speech I gave at the Mobile Marketing Forum in Berlin last week. This one covers formats for mobile advertising and if that sounds a little dry and geeky, bear with me as it's not really and more importantly, could stop you wasting all your budget on your mobile activity.
Before we get onto the waste side of things though, let's remind ourselves that the hot topic in mobile is Apps at the moment. If you were one of the 11 brands speaking in Berlin, you'd have been unusual if your presentation didn't include "..and here's our iPhone App" and that ranged from Coke to BMW to Lufthansa. If you haven't been reading all my posts here, that might sound a little niche, but to put it in perspective, there are over 3 million iPod Touchs and iPhones in the UK, which is about the same addressable market as The Sun these days.
Another debating point among these iMarketers is whether Apps are here to stay, or if the mobile web will eventually take over. Is it a short term marketing initiative, or will Apps be around for a few years?
I'd argue pretty strongly that they're going to be around a lot longer than other pundits might think. One of the major reasons people like Apps is because of the speed of interaction they offer, which operator networks can't compete with today and won't for some time in the future. So even if next-gen handsets can do everything Apps can, they'll still do it slower. A further reason is that Apps give a sense of "ownership", which is really important, especially for the paid-for ones. Getting people to purchase the rights to say, a game over the mobile web feels completely different to selling them the actual App, even though the outcome is similar from a practical perspective.
At some point (maybe 5 years) Apps might evolve into little more than bookmarks to launch mobile web services, but for the immediate horizon they're here to stay and therefore worth thinking about and perhaps investing marketing dollars.
So what have formats got to do with wasting your investment in mobile? Whether you run ads on the mobile web (very sensible) or within applications (great idea) and the consumer clicks on your ad, you need to think about where they go next - the Landing Page. The Post-Click experience is actually at least as important as your original creative as if the consumer gets there and can't interact, you've just wasted the opportunity to engage altogether, as well as the money you spent on the ad.
There's an awful lot of learning in the post-click activity, so it's worth talking to someone who knows what they're doing before you kick something off. However, one thing is clear to anyone with mobile experience; you need to optimise for mobile and you can't just send them to the same page as your PC activity. At the worse case, the page won't load at all or will partially load - this is when the PC site is built using Flash. Look what happened to this advertiser when they delivered their hard-won potential customer to their PC site.
Not only that, but it's a very poor user experience.
It's not just about Flash though. Compare the Market and the lovable Meercats has been one of the great digital marketing success stories of recent years and you can bet that their PC website represents state-of-the-art direct response, with numerous clear calls to action, depending on why the consumer is there in the first place. This approach just doesn't work in the mobile world.
I saw their ad in an application (not one of ours I hasten to add) a few weeks ago and clicked on it and got this:
Hmmm...what are they expecting me to do now? A mobile landing page needs a clear call-to-action, it needs to be less busy as speeds are slower than broadband and while people will fill in simple forms, this type is going to be far too fiddly. Shouldn't they have included a click-to-call button? After all, I'm on a mobile phone and that's probably the easiest way to get me to give the information they need to get me a quote.
Finally, where are those cuddly meercat characters, which are so central to the brand and marketing proposition. Can you guess? That's right, they should appear in that curiously empty box in the prime real estate at the top and centre. But they're in Flash, so you can't see them. [At the time of writing, the Meercats have been replaced by another, equally un-seeable Flash animation of cars and potential insurance prices.]
OK, it's possible that a determined consumer will be prepared to drill
down and interact in this case, but it's not going to be easy and
conversion rates are going to suffer.
In fairness to both these advertisers, it's very possible that they don't know that their ad buys include mobile and thus they wouldn't have known about the need to optimise. Some advertising networks simply bundle mobile into their clients' campaigns, but these wasted clicks are still charged for and equally importantly, the consumer's exposure to mobile advertising ends in frustration. Let's hope that this practice ends soon.
In an ideal world, there would be one web for all devices and maybe that'll come true some day. Until that happens though, remember that optimisation for mobile is absolutely key to success in mobile advertising.
