Opinion

Interactivity is essential for the future of mobile video ads

Life-like CGI, haptic feedback and zero second load times are all essential if Australia's mobile video advertisers ever want to keep up with the times writes Tom Simpson, head of growth and programmatic for AdColony APAC.

The measure of a successful mobile advertisement is its ability to cut through today’s over-saturated ad space and capture user attention through interaction. This is an imperative for advertisers in Australia, where digital advertising spend accounted for almost half of the country’s advertising spend in 2016.

And today that task is even more difficult. Audiences have more control regarding when, how and where they access information and media. Attention spans are short and fragmented, people are multi-tasking, jumping from one screen to another, and drastically shifting their media habits away from the status quo. 

The industry has long been talking about the need for interactive mobile video. But advertisers need to be aware that not all mobile video advertisements are effective, and to remain cognizant about the factors that contribute to a quality advertising experience.  

In this regard, advertisers should look to ad formats that not only captivate users, enticing them to lean-in, and also leverage ad tech that measures attention via viewer interactions. 

Most video creatives that are typically referred to as interactive video, are in truth a rich media-like overlay that will most likely drive a user away from the video to a landing page via their mobile web browser.

Secondly, the size of a video is so large that it takes an age to buffer and load. How is it meant to engage a user or ensure viewability? How is it meant to track user engagement? 

As advertisers around the world embrace video, making it one of the most important channels of advertising for marketers of all sizes, mobile marketing has to go beyond mere impressions and deliver on brand as well as performance metrics. This is especially true in the age of social videos and user-generated content, and is especially relevant to the Australian advertising market, where statistics from the Commercial Economic Advisory Service of Australia (CEASA) indicates that close to half of the country’s total advertising spend had been invested in digital advertising.

Digital advertising in Australia has seen steady and significant growth over the years, with mobile advertising gaining an increasingly larger share of this pie. Figures from a study conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Australia (IAB) reveal changing consumption habits amongst audiences, with Australian consumers now spending 63% of their time spent on digital devices on smartphones.

Coming to the point we made earlier about attention – how can an ad know it has captured a viewer’s attention? This is where the potential of a small screen is huge.

As a rule of thumb, mobile marketers must make videos for the mobile screen more effective than TV ads by incorporating some of the following: In-video interactivity that allows users to touch, tap, tilt, shake or swipe their devices to affect what is happening on the screen; life-like graphics, usually only possible in CGI and games; ads you can feel, that rumble and shake and HD quality and zero buffering so ads load instantly.

The maturing mobile advertising market in Australia will present numerous opportunities for advertisers. The resulting deluge of mobile advertisements will in turn prompt a pressing need for advertisers to utilise more entertaining and less intrusive forms of digital advertisements that can successfully reach out through an oversaturated ad space and avoid alienating viewers.

Interactive mobile advertising that create great brand experiences alone will lead to engagement. Whether it is touching the screen and unlocking the rewards, tilting the phone or allowing an automobile video to be pulled up in real-time to make the car on the screen move the way a user wants, tapping on products and adding them to carts, or adding dynamic end cards to avail a voucher or redeem a discount; only via engagement can you measure whether or not an ad has captured the viewer’s attention.

And that is the foundation of effective advertising.

Tom Simpson, is head of growth and programmatic for AdColony APAC.

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