Ignore UX At Your Peril. If Context Is God, UX Is The Messenger.
GaryVee and Building Better Mobile Ad Experiences
If you work in digital media or have ever taken a stroll through startup-land you’ve probably heard of Gary Vaynerchuk. The founder and CEO of Vayner Media has consistently been ahead of trends in social and mobile media for years and is an outspoken voice in the industry.
You might have also heard one of Vaynerchuk’s most famous and often repeated axioms that “Content is King, but Context is God.”
What he means is that while marketers must be able to create valuable content to engage consumers they also must be mindful of the context in which that content reaches the audience.
For a bit more background on the topic here’s a good primer in Vaynerchuk’s own words which I recommend.
My favorite example he uses in the post above is of an unwanted Acura ad on ESPN’s mobile site where he explains:
I often tell the story of a negative experience I had with an Acura ad. I was on ESPN on mobile and trying to click out of a pop up ad, but it ended up clicking through to Acura’s website instead. My experience was actually sold back to Acura as an “impression” and a “click through.” Which, for you non-marketers, means intent or interest. And yet nothing could be further from the truth. I had no intent or interest whatsoever. Acura stole my most precious asset: time.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not mad at ESPN. It’s not their fault why I’ll never buy an Acura.
I like this example because I think most people can relate to this kind of negative experience with mobile ads. We’re minding our own business, trying to access content that is valuable to us and in one way or another we are interrupted by an ad in a really intrusive way.
Vaynerchuk goes on to offer offer a call to action that advertisers need to stop roadblocking users and instead bring them value.
While I totally agree that advertising needs to clean up its act I think he is missing a very important nuance here. The blame for this poor user experience is not at all the fault of Acura.
As users, even if it is the advertiser who bears the brunt of our anger over crappy ads, it is generally not the brand’s fault that we had a negative experience. As Vaynerchuk admits, his poor quality ad experience was sold back to Acura as a valuable interaction with a consumer when it most obviously was not.
From this angle, Acura seems a lot more like the sucker in this story than the malicious time-thief. Their marketing team paid real money to promote their brand on a reputable site and instead came away with an angry consumer who, incidentally also shared that negative experience with his 1.3 Million twitter followers…Ouch!
Of course this is not a unique occurrence. Accidentally clicking on a mobile ad is only one of several highly annoying potential outcomes from mobile advertising. One of the fastest growing and most irritating interruptions is having mobile video ads that take an excruciatingly long time to load. Or how about those mobile in-read formats that expand out over the text you’re reading and you can’t scroll past because they take up your entire screen?!
The one thing that all of these examples have in common is that the advertiser has little if any direct control over them. These are all design problems around the user experience of either the ad itself or of the underlying ad tech architecture delivering the ad. The former being the responsibility of the creative agency and the latter relying on the quality of the publisher’s ad stack.
Failures of UX like those mentioned above are what are really driving low quality mobile ad experiences. The unfortunate result in every case is that the message gets lost.
UX Is The Prophet Of Context
A prophet is traditionally someone who claims to carry a divine message. The job of a prophet is to ensure that the message gets through clearly to the people without any confusion.
So if content is king and context is god, then the job of UX design — like that of a prophet — is to make sure that the message gets through to the user with as little friction as possible. Unfortunately in the examples mentioned above the experience is anything but frictionless.
A mobile video ad taking 10 seconds to load = friction.
Full screen in-read units that can’t be scrolled past = friction.
Mobile ad units that can be accidentally clicked = friction.
All that friction not only makes people hate the brand, it also makes them do things in aggregate like installing ad blockers that are harmful to the media industry as a whole. And this brings me back to the idea that poor quality mobile ad experiences are less the fault of the advertiser and more the fault poor UX design in how ads are displayed on mobile.
The Responsibility of the Publisher
If the advertiser is an unwitting victim of bad mobile UX then who is to blame for all this friction?
Perhaps not all, but most of the blame actually does fall on the publisher.
In Vaynerchuk’s example he exonerates ESPN because he likes the content that ESPN gives him.
Ok, but isn’t it up to ESPN to ensure a quality user experience on it’s site?Shouldn’t ESPN make sure that the way mobile ad units display is not interruptive of their user experience? Only ESPN can reject ad creative that falls short of their UX quality standards. Only ESPN has the power to leverage technologies to reduce video latency. Only ESPN sets the size parameters for mobile ad units it sells to advertisers like Acura.
To be fair, Vaynerchuk is looking at this from the perspective of users and advertisers because that’s his wheelhouse, so it makes sense that he would not focus on the role of the publisher.
Nonetheless, ESPN’s failure to fix this problem is costing them and other publishers like them in terms lost revenue from ad-blocker adoption and user attrition.
Is ad UX a problem for advertisers to which they are often blind? Sure it is. But it is the publishers who need to right this ship. The role of Advertisers is to ask the tough questions of their publishers and creative agencies to make sure that ad UX is properly taken into account for their campaigns.
Ignoring the Messenger
So I think that Vaynerchuk is wrong to give ESPN a free pass. It is up to publishers like ESPN to fix these issues. They are the sole gatekeepers of the quality of the UX on their digital properties.
But there is some good news for mobile publishers. This UX stuff is not rocket science.
Zero-latency solutions already exist. Making sure ad units are the right size and up to creative standards for a mobile environment can avoid accidental clicks. Publishers just need to make solutions to these issues central to their thinking around their ad products.
Ignoring the messenger of god has never been without risk. While the man upstairs might not smite you for turning a deaf ear, the angry masses are eager to mete out some divine justice of their own. In fact they are already doing so by blocking ads and destroying the ad supported publishing model itself.
So mobile publishers beware; the end is nigh. Repent now and fix your interruptive ways.
Grant Gudgel is a co-founder and CSO of VIDCOIN, where our crack team of digital ad engineers are hacking the programmatic ecosystem to make zero-latency programmatic video the new standard for delivering quality video ad experiences to mobile users. Grant lives in New York and works with top digital publishers to improve the user experience of their digital video ad inventory across all devices, both in-stream and out. #UXMatters
