Mobile Phone Ads: New, Exciting, Tiny

An article on Online Media Daily extols cell-phone banners as more clickworthy than banners appearing elsewhere, and equally as conducive to recall as TV advertising:

“The banner ads work really well, and that’s where you have the greatest reach,” [mobile advertising leader for Verizon Wireless Stephanie Bauer] Marshall said, adding that she “was blown away” by IAG data showing they were on par with TV spots in terms of brand recall. (IAG used the same method for measuring brand recall that it does with TV ads.) Mobile banner ads also produce click-through rates that are “exponentially higher than online” banner ads, where CTR has fallen to about 0.3%; mobile banners produce an overall click-through rate of 2%, even “slightly higher for entertainment brands.”

I’m blown away too..by the lack of insight. The high CTR isn’t runoff from some magical quality inherent in cell phones. Interactive, phone-friendly WEP pages are still relatively new in the American mainstream, and so are ads that are designed (both visually and technically) for the mobile screen. Advertising (along with porn) is always going to be at the forefront of new technology, and users – especially users who are regularly surfing the web on their phones in 2008 – want to see what those crazy kids have come up with this time. I click on all sorts of things in my iPhones’s “Safari” browser that I wouldn’t click on otherwise – including -ads – because I want to see how they display, especially if I’m looking at something that was obviously designed for phone browsers.

As for TV-level recall. We’ll see how that pans out when mobile banners are so common that users stop noticing them, or start blocking them. Mobile bandwidth is precious, and ads can slow page load. And when the iPhone API is unlocked, some of the countless free applications available from hackers around the world are bound to be ad blockers.

photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr.