Mobile advertising: help is at hand
Smartphone advertising is not getting any better, and has not improved despite larger screens. Increasingly intrusive formats combined with unimaginative advertisements have no positive impact on users, and their success is measured by agencies on the basis of clickthrough that is mostly the result of people desperately trying to get things off their screens. On the older, smaller screen smartphones, our fingers seemed bigger and what used to happen often was that we ended up clicking on advertisements we weren’t interested in, and that were simply in the way.
It’s pretty much what happened with other formats, that get worse and worse, until somebody decides to take the bull by the horns and use technology imaginatively. We saw this with the early internet-based advertising and the battle of the pop-ups, when advertisements would move around the screen to avoid the mouse seeking to click them into oblivion, or others that had a false close button… And then came Google and other companies’ pop-up blockers, which were soon incorporated into navigators. Later on came adblockers, which in some parts of the world and among certain sections of the population have been adopted by up to 40 percent of users. Smartphone advertising seems to be headed in the same direction, but in seemingly more controlled environment, and where it is harder to protect oneself from unwanted advertising.
When Google removed adblockers from its Play Market a couple of years ago, many of us thought this was a mistake and a threat to the user experience. The ban didn’t stop many of us installing such apps, but it made things difficult for some people, and involved finding them from other sources.
Among other things, the move prompted AdBlock Plus, the leader in the sector, to launch its own smartphone browser based on Firefox with its service built in. Soon, it will be available on Chrome too, since Google has now made it possible to build an open-source browser for Android based on Chrome. Given that adblockers are among the most popular add-ons to computer navigators, we can surely expect the phenomenon to be repeated in the smartphone world, which will lead us, sooner rather than later, to that hoped for self-regulation of advertising formats that will avoid the downward spiral of user experience.
These kinds of developments can, from certain perspectives, produce paradoxes: problems created by technology that are later solved by technology. What technology gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. If you’re a smartphone user, this is good news: soon you will have a means to defend yourself from increasingly bothersome advertising. If you’re an advertiser, agency, or website… then start thinking about what you might have been getting wrong.
(En español, aquí)
