This blogpost has been originally published on Appsfire Blog http://blog.appsfire.com/mobile-ads-suck-whats-next/
How many years will it take until we see the banner die as we know it on our mobile screens?
The lack of real discovery efficiency (yes, the app stores are far from doing enough…) has forced developers to look after efficient paid discovery solutions (some too efficient and frankly borderline legit!).
But over half a decade after the iPhone, amazing hardware and software innovations the mobile ad world is still stuck in the past with the good old banner and advertising technologies.
What’s wrong with banners?
Mobile ads are UGLY
Banners are ugly. They eat the chunk of real estate of the app, They offer little real estate for a clear message.
Beautiful apps become ugly because of mobile ads. Here is an example from Instaweather, a gorgeous weather app, they developers have decided to ruin with crapy ads…
But let’s go beyond the design factor. There is something worse. Such ads are brutally killing the user experience.
App publishers may think of ads as something that is not part of their app. But they are. Users will perceive it that way.
Ads, like the app the developer builds, are also a message the developers send to the users. And it is a bad one. It says “get out of my app”, “don’t stay here” and it ruins the experience of 99% of the users who decide to ignore and can’t ignore it (banners cannot be removed).
It would be cool if the the users were redirected to a great destination. But it is not. The experience is actually pretty bad.
Users are forced out of the app, go to the App Store to download an app and then are left with 2 choices:
A. Start from scratch with a new app
B. Try to return where they left off before they clicked on the ad
And how about those ads clicked by accident because they are where they are not supposed to be. This has forced Google to introduce a TWO CLICK banner experience. Nice Band Aid. What a TERRIBLE TERRIBLE IDEA!
How is that for a good user experience?
Mobile ads are DUMB
How many times have you seen an ad and said to yourself “I don’t want to see this specific ad EVER again”, or “mmm, ok i like this, but not right now” or even worse “Why do i see a banner of an app i already own” (e.g. Facebook ads…)
The reality is that no matter how sophisticated the mobile app ecosystem is,mobile ads are still in their prehistoric phase. They are served by dated ad serving technologies which were built for the desktop and the cookies (the tracking files on your computer).
They are served mostly with the purpose of driving installs but blatantly ignoring the 99% who do not install apps.
Mobile ads are TIME CONSUMING
If your attention is limited on the desktop, it is even more limited on the mobile. So Advertisers have figured out that if you don’t pay attention to mobile banners, maybe a nice little video will be cool. But guess what, on the mobile, the attention generosity of the average user is not even a fraction of its equivalent on the desktop.
Users don’t want to wait 15 sec to see a video. Not even 10 secs.
Oh, yes…Well a magical solution has been found to solve this: rewarding users to watch videos….is that the best that can be done to solve the “mobile ads suck” problem?
Rewarding users is surely a nice patch, a good band aid but that works only with a small fraction of the inventory out there and that is certainly the right way to grow the ecosystem at scale (how many publishers can put 10 sec videos in their app? localize them,…). And let’s not bet that the future of mobile advertising is rewarded advertising…
Mobile ads are NOT RESPECTFUL
Have you ever seen the banner below?
Seriously? This banner is often advertising an app that has always been free or worse, that is not FREE TODAY!
Users are not dumb. You can’t just disrespect users and just expect to get crazy results in return. Those kind of manipulative tricks are not sustainable, they’re done. What is the underlying ad network? Who is the advertiser? Give me a reason to believe that this app is FREE TODAY? [of course it is not..]
Developers who show ads like those because they receive a check at the end of the month should simply be ashamed.
The core of the problem lies in the fact that the ad industry is driven by a single goal: drive app installs and not engaged users. This short term vision and misaligned interests generate all kinds of crappy creative and bad faith from advertisers and ad networks.
This has to end. Maybe regulators will look at this closer. Apple and Google, for example should be more regarding in that matter.
Mobile ads are NOT TRANSPARENT
How many times have you seen an ad allowing you to immediately identify the ad network behind it? It is sometimes possible (e.g. Google) but it is really hard and very very rare. Most of the time consumers (and even developers who host those banners) will have no clue about what ad network is serving the banner because of various parameters like mediation layers technology or because ad network have a vested interest in not being identified.
Why does that matter? Because users have to have a chance to opt out, users have to have a chance to know with whom they enter in contract with.
Mobile Ads are NOT DISCLOSED
An ad should be identified as an ad. And not confused with content or something else. There are laws about this.
So in theory users should know when an ad is an ad. But that is far from a common practice. How many time did you see an offer wall, of even a full screen ad not even presented as advertising? Those formats have an intent to blur the line between content and advertising, ultimately resulting in confusion and manipulation.
The above example is sorely missing a subtitle “ADS BY ….”.
Here is another example, the “Offer Wall”, a marvel of the 21st century. Do you think users know those are ads?
Mobile Ads are NOT LOCALIZED
Most smartphone users are not in the USA. But most big ad networks are in the USA. You can’t just expect to show a banner in English to a Spanish user and expect him to love it.
Oh, yes. It requires a little more work and little more time. But all that is creating is more hate, confusion and frustration from users towards mobile ads.
So Why doesn’t it change?
Because money flow in and because it is easy for developers to just take whatever is available. For now. But that won’t last.
Why? BECAUSE NOBODY LIKES IT!
Facebook, thanks to a nice integrated ad format that sucks less, and its fairly efficient proprietary targeting, has created a user experience that has basically broken the status quo. Most ad networks have seen massive transfer away from their low CTR inventory for the past 12 months. Strike one.
Developers will soon have more difficulty in making money through traditional ads and they will be forced to look at different solutions.
Even Mobile App developer think Mobile ads suck
We ran a poll with 500 seasoned developers. And about half of them think current ad formats suck. They are either unhappy for any reason about the current status or think they damage the user experience.
So it is not just users who really ignore them and don’t like them.
Those who make apps are also far from being convinced by any solution the market currently brings.
Oh and don’t take just our word for it. Just a run a Google search for “Mobile ads suck”.
There is even a conference to talk about this topic, with people smarter than we are in a few weeks in San Francisco.
The vague promise of native advertising
So everyone is now expecting the next big thing in advertising looking in Facebook’s direction: native ads.
The problem is that the same mistakes are being made. See above.
Native advertising should be about providing a compelling user experience,an intelligent end-to-end experience from the exposure of the ad to the post download experience.
Native advertising should feel native and “integrated” both in terms of where it is placed and how (fast) it is served. But it should not be confused with content. It’s hard to solve this at scale… except if you want to take shortcuts (Facebook for example did this by placing ads that are all but social in their social network – that’s another long debate).
Saying you provide native advertising because you have an SDK with a few lines of code and a crafted banner is far from enough.
Mobile ads will always suck. But they can suck a little less.
The reality is that mobile ads (like any ad) will always be a nuisance to users – even with incentives. But users can tolerate ads. They have been trained by years of radio and TV. The question is how can you make the 90% of users who decide to ignore them hate them a little less?
How can the industry as a whole, focus more on those who hate ads and really improve the experience and not just be obsessed by the 10% who are clicking? (or are those bots?)
Those are tough questions and no one has the right answer. But it certainly has to do with thinking about the user first and not just the performance for the advertiser driven with the objective to reach a maximum number of downloads or a top rank in the app store. The day developers will bring the same level of care about how ads are integrated in their apps as to the way they build apps, maybe a significant step will be reached.
And that will happen when the ad industry will help developers by creating services who deeply care for users.
Appsfire is currently working on something new. We hope to share more details soon.
