Now that access to the internet via mobile devices is past 50% compared to access via desktop, it makes sense that internet models of making money is becoming prevalent in the mobile world. Unlike ads in traditional platforms such as TV or radio, these ads get especially crafty on mobile. Here are the different types of ads that are shown on mobile devices.
First and foremost, there are location based type of ads that might be in text, MMS, or some kind of rich media format. Your smartphone knows where you are, so the service provider knows where you are, and so it’s a marketing ad marriage made in heaven. Clearly, certain businesses would love to take advantage of where you are at and propose some kind of “special” to you if you are near them. Like a special on coffee from a coffee shop. It would be nice to get this if the ad provider “knew” I liked coffee, and it would be super annoying if I didn’t drink coffee. Dialogic has had some of our customers, using our PowerMedia XMS software based media server, deploy these location based advertisements to the benefit of the enterprise putting these advertisements out.
Video Ad
Another type of ad would be a video ad. We’ve all seen these – you can’t get to your search until you watch at least 5 to 10 seconds of an ad. If you don’t know what I mean, go to the Weather Channel. It’s annoying, but I get why they these ads exist.
Banner Ad
Banner ads are another type of ad. They are somewhat unobtrusive, at least compared to the video ad above, though I have accidently clicked on these, which seems to be a more common occurrence than I thought since Retale did a survey in early 2016 that showed 60% of all mobile banner ad clicks are accidental. Studies have also shown that mobile banner ads are not terribly effective, simply because people know they are ads so they don’t click on them (except by accident!).
Pop Ups
Pop up ads are also another type of ad. I’ve seen these with games, but I’m sure they are everywhere. In August, Google said they might send less traffic to websites that make use of these types of ads. The blog post said “Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”
Native Ad
You will also encounter native ads. According to the Mobile Marketing Association, “native advertising is distinct from content marketing. Where content marketing aims to match content and format, native advertising, at least on mobile devices, is primarily an ad format that matches the style of the site or app where it serves.” In other words, it looks like what you are typically used to seeing. I see a lot of these native ads on Twitter for instance, since I’m using Twitter for work quite a bit.
Voice Ads
And finally, we might see voice enter to fray. Voice ads have potential. These are ads you can talk to, and will respond with more questions to “help us” find what we’re looking for. It first came out in 2013, but I haven’t seen much of it yet. Here’s an example of what the voice ads are like. After all, we’re getting used to talking to the internet – see Siri or Cortana – so why not have the internet talk back to us?
There are strong players on each side of the mobile ad controversy. Next week, I’ll talk about the never-ending battle between advertisers and ad blockers on mobile.
