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Mobile Advertising

The future of mobile: moving from user-last to user-first

By Amy Kean | head of futures

September 1, 2015 | 6 min read

Hey, mobile - 2001 called, they want their digital advertising formats back.

There’s a worrying trend for ‘user-last’ mobile marketing developing, with the experience across many mobile sites becoming clunky, intrusive and irritating at best. It’s a familiar journey; you click on a link shared by a Facebook friend but before you reach the article you’re asked to ‘Like’ the publisher. You land on the article and five seconds later there’s a full-screen pop up ad for a cleaning brand you need to realise you are expected to physically shake to make the cleaning product clean a fictitious kitchen floor. Once completed, only there are you finally offered the freedom to consume some content. Unfortunately after having to reload the page to read the second and third paragraphs you realise it wasn’t a great article anyway because it uses the word ‘sassy’ to describe a female chief executive.

Full-screen pop-ups are just one manifestation of this ‘mobile intrusion’ trend; we also have floating transparent creative, pages cluttered with ads, mobile video pre-roll the same length as PC-based, and significantly reduced functionality.

Mobile is definitely the most emotional medium, boasting a greater direct link to consumer ‘feeling’ and subsequent ‘doing’, than any other. In May, Havas Media’s Meaningful Brands survey found that amongst users, Whatspp was considered more meaningful than traditional broadcasters such as ITV and Channel 5. These users are looking for something more connected and social, more versatile and most of all; more polite than regular media - the fact that Whatsapp has yet to commercialise the platform is likely to be one of the many drivers of its continued growth.

But maintaining manners is just one of the present challenges that mobile publishers, advertisers and users face in the present day:

Time spent vs. money invested. It’s well documented that UK audiences spend a lot more time on mobile than advertisers do money - around 25 per cent of our media day compared with around 15 per cent of ad spend. But a calculation for ideal media investment is more complicated than time vs money, as devices get more personal - just because someone has a smartwatch on them all day, doesn’t mean they should get 100 per cent of our advertising budgets.

Intrusion vs. entertainment. This is the biggest hurdle facing mobile right now, with publishers needing to monetise and marketers desperate to get attention. But intrusion on mobile is potentially even more overwhelming than the pop-ups we saw 15 years ago. Below is a screengrab of a common modern mobile experience – somewhere behind the pop-up is a news story I tried to read about Jeremy Corbyn (which again, I eventually wished I hadn’t).

The introduction of ad blocking on iOS9, however, may force brands and planners to offer an alternative to the user-last intrusion of old-school ads. We’re starting to see more added value with branded levels in casual games and genuinely entertaining branded content, but these experiences inevitably take more time and money to plan, and also have the added challenge of draining the user’s data. Line – the messaging app most popular in APAC markets such as Japan, Taiwan and Thailand – seems to have struck that perfect balance, not only turning stickers into a multi-million dollar industry but also generating money for its users too, with the introduction its UGC stickers last year.

So in the future, is there a smarter way for mobile? Well yes. Arguably the data side of the device is unparalleled. Suppliers like Weve can offer some of the best audience segmentation I’ve seen using actual (not declared) interests and behaviours, with the added bonus of real-time location and demographics. Is it the data and insights side of mobile we should be concentrating on first?

Recently Facebook launched messenger-based personal assistant M following the lead of Siri and Cortana to learn users’ behaviours and provide personalised guidance to make their lives easier, all the while gathering a huge amount of data about people’s wants and needs. Despite unleashing a whole new raft of privacy concerns, M promises a better user experience, more bespoke advertising, and the ability to predict behaviour to make mobile a more relevant medium, commercially.

If the future of mobile is artificially intelligent, at least it has the potential to be relevant rather than intrusive, and by its very nature AI is intended to improve all the time, as user sophisticated increases. Whatever happens, we need to get rid of these user-last pop-ups, so that the only relationship between 2001 and our mobiles is the funky S Club 7 ringtone.

Amy Kean is head of futures for Havas Media UK

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