This video was too funny and so true that I had to share. Hubspot mentioned on their blog today that, collectively, Americans spend over 1 million months on their mobile phones per day. So you would think that by now, with today’s technology and data available on mobile phone usage, advertisers would have figured out how to make mobile advertising work. But SolveMedia has found that you are 116 times more likely to survive a rattlesnake bite than to intentionally click on a mobile banner ad!
So if you’re thinking about advertising online with mobile ads, this video has two really great points to keep in mind as you are deciding.
There was a lot of hilariousness in that video but I hope you caught the two points it was trying to make about why mobile ads are so bad.
Mobile ads get in the way of what you’re doing, and they’re so tiny that they’re easy to ignore
Like the video mentions, we use our mobile phones to connect with others on social networks, share pictures and videos, read articles, browse pictures, play games, the list goes on. Then in the middle of your Angry Birds game or charming YouTube video, you get a banner ad that takes up part of your screen. You either accidentally click on it and get taken into the internet abyss, or you vigorously try to click the tiny “x” to get rid of it. It’s really annoying, and 99% of the time you don’t even remember what the ad was selling. Why don’t you remember the ad? It was probably because it was tiny and not in any way within the context of what you were doing, so you were able to easily ignore the message it was trying to get across to you.
As a small business owner, what do you do with this information?
Am I saying you should never invest in mobile online advertising? No. But I would definitely think outside of the box when coming up with a mobile advertising campaign idea. And when you are deciding where your ads will be seen, make sure you are targeting the right audience and taking into consideration the context of the pages you are on. Make the ads really relevant to the viewers and have them easy be easy to read or understand, or risk being completely ignored.
I’ll give you a real life example. Refinery29 is one of my favorite sites, and while they don’t always get mobile or online advertising right, they are going in the right direction with some of their ads. When viewing a slide show of images of fashionable outfits, the featured ads in the slideshow are also showing fashionable outfits from a specific brand or boutique. In that specific context, I was already looking at fashionable outfits, so seeing more outfits from a specific brand or boutique doesn’t bother me, I will actually click on the ad if I like the outfit featured, and I just might buy it. It was large enough to make me notice, and the ad was integrated into the Refinery29’s slideshow so well that it did not seem disruptive to my casual browsing.
Till Faida, founder of Adblock Plus, has an interesting thought and hopes for the future of online ads in general. “There is another way – and other forms of advertising have been able to achieve acceptance. For example, our research also shows that 63 per cent of people are not bothered at all by advertising in print magazines. Social media seems to have a few things to learn from more traditional advertising mediums.”
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