In The World Of Mobile Ads, Winning Over Your Consumer Is About All About Quality
Previously, I touched on the idea that to have great advertisements, in general, you must speak with your audience and get them to really engage with your brand. In this post, I am going to expand on that idea a little further, with a particular focus on full screen interstitial mobile advertisements.
If you’ve not got time to read the article in full, here’s the super-fast 6 point summary:
- Let your users choose whether they want to experience the ad – don’t force it upon them
- Give them a reason to interact with your ad
- Stop being so goddam needy!
- The fastest way to piss off your audience is bad UX
- Make better, more creative mobile ads
- Leverage agile partners
So, how can we focus on quality when we’re putting together mobile ads? How can we make mobile ads more engaging?
Are all interstitial mobile advertisements bad?
In a word: no. The key with full screen interstitial mobile advertisements though is to make use of all that screen real estate you’re taking over. Don’t take the piss and just show them a dull static image with some terrible stock photo and “click here” call to action text. Last year, UK supermarket chain Morrisons partnered with media agency MEC and LoopMe for a full screen geo-location campaign.
At the end of the campaign, engaged users were surveyed. They found that not only did purchase intent increase among respondents, but their perception of competitors, like Aldi and Tesco were actually negatively impacted. It goes to show that if you’re willing to stand out from the crowd, your audience is going to reward you.
You owe it to your clients to not sacrifice your values with bad advertisements. The ads you have must reflect both your brand and the landing page that you are directing them to. Make the experience seamless for your potential clients. The worst you can do is have a static image about a product and then direct them to a page where the product is impossible to find. Engage with the user to follow the advertisement through and seamlessly drive your new client through a funnel to convert them into a customer.
How can you interact with your clients?
One of the most important things to understand is that any ad (whether it’s an interstitial mobile advertisement or anything else) must have a good point. Either it’s building your brand, selling a product or you just want to highlight something. You should focus on something to really create a good interactive advertisement.
The advertisement should be fun for the customer to connect with. Or at least invoke some sort of emotional response. Make it really clear what you are expecting the user to do and make sure they understand it from the moment they lay eyes on the creative.
Make sure that you have thought about the entire funnel the user goes through in the ad unit and make sure that landing page reflects that. You don’t want to lose your client midway!
And a quick word on animation. If you’re going to do it, do it properly. If you’re going to use crappy, laggy animations – just forget about it. A lot of platforms go way overboard with the animations they offer, ending in bad user experiences since the ad takes forever to load. Then when it does load it’s worse than looking at a flip book. You want to have smooth animation that delivers a premium experience for the user. Not many platforms out there can deliver on this promise.
Make sure that all your partners are agile and able to make changes quickly. You never know what might happen midway of the campaign run time. Many platforms promise they are quick to make changes, but that might mean days of work to get make a few minor tweaks to a creative.
Creating interstitial mobile advertisements doesn’t need to take forever
It used to be the case that full screen interstitial mobile advertisements were only the preserve of the big budget players, but, as Mr Dylan himself said, “The times they are a changin;”. There’s an abundance of tools and platforms out there now. So, whether you’re a one man band, looking for a quick, easy tool or time-poor media buyer working on a huge project for {insert instantly recognisable brand name here}.
You’ve got things like Facebook Canvas, which is very easy to use, but Canvas ads can only appear in the Facebook app. Granted, that can still be a pretty huge audience, but it can still be a pretty serious limitation. You’ve also got Celtra’s Ad Creator, which, to be honest, is aimed at big agencies and the like. It’s also limited by the fact it uses HTML5. Then you have Adcanvas. Easy to use. Not built on an ageing framework.