How not to do in-app mobile advertising
Advertising has been around for years, in fact Wikipedia reckons the Egyptians used papyrus for making advertising so that’s certainly a bloody long time. We’ve learned a lot over the years, not only about how to do it but also how to fail — just search for ‘advertising failures’ on Google and you’ll find some pretty hilarious stuff. We’ve seen it change dramatically, especially over the last century, what with different styles and media: print, radio and TV and in the last 15 years or so this thing called the interwebs.
The last few years has seen the mobile industry grow massively: gone are the days of WAP with pure text pages and slow loading. The iPhone and 3G networks have had a large part to play in this and will no doubt continue to do so. But it’s the likes of Android and other platforms that are driving prices down and giving consumers choice, making high speed internet on smartphones available to every man and his dog (can dogs use touch screens?). And to go with this, every platform now has its own app store, surely tempted in (for better or worse) by the 300k+ apps 7 billion+ downloads in the Apple app store.
This is great news for developers, being able to make millions from creating an app in your bedroom sounds like a dream come true. I’m a developer and I own a smartphone and I’ve been pretty tempted by apps, as there a couple of choices for monetization: free and ad/sponsor supported or paid. Both work quite nicely depending on the type of app, but the ad-supported model is interesting as consumers are willing to download a free app to try it without much thought. A combination of these 2 business plans is being fairly widely used, and if the free app with advertising and then a paid app with more features.
Waffle over: what bugs me about all this is that all the advertising I’ve seen in-app has been truly terrible. It’s like we’ve gone back in time 10 years and people are just discovering flash banner ads for the first time. Not one has even nearly made me want to click on it — the creative and messaging have both been rubbish. Is it too much to ask for someone to spend more than a few minutes on a decent, clever bit of creative for these ads? I’m talking mainly about the static pre-game ads as there’s more screen real-estate to play with rather than the little ads.
I’ve seen one full on video ad as a pre-roll before a game in Solitaire on the iPhone and this has 2 massive problems: first it froze my game for 20 seconds whilst it downloaded and it played on full volume whilst I was having a nice quiet game on the tube, making me look and feel like a right idiot. All this for Olay! I appreciate they can’t target ads so I’m willing to sit through or skip an ad about moisturiser, but the autoplay gave me such a strong negative feeling towards the advertiser (Transpera in this case) and the brand, totally defying the point of advertising in the first place. That and also I’m quick to skip the ads now before they even start that it’s a waste of the brand’s money and surely results in a tiny click-through-rate.
So there we go, that’s how to not do in-app advertising. Get some decent creative and don’t be intrusive.
