Small can be beautiful: Five tips to make good mobile ads
Following an article by Mumbrella’s Alex Hayes on the state of mobile creative Google’s Lisa Bora shares some tips and Australian examples for making good mobile ads.
Alex, you’re right. Small is not always beautiful. We’ve all experienced mobile ads that confuse, obstruct or annoy. And reading your article on Monday (If mobile is the most important screen, why are the ads still so shit?) brought it all back.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There is some great creative on mobile – and when agencies combine imagination and digital skills, some truly exceptional creative too.
Mobile is a key part of digital advertising. In many countries around the world, including the US and Japan, more people use Google search on mobile than desktop. So we appreciate a great mobile ad when we see it. With that in mind, here are our five tips for producing great creative on mobile, each demonstrated with an Aussie example.
1. Make it easy
When we are on our mobiles, we don’t have the time, patience or eyesight for reading long bodies of text. An ad that seems clean on desktop can give us cognitive overload on a mobile screen. With a scarcity of space, your proposition has to shine through with more clarity than ever before. Hyundai’s ad for their Tucson is a great example: a single, aspirational image and a ‘play’ button bang in the middle of the screen for those who want to watch a video. Job done.
2. Make it targeted
Mobile takes location targeting to new heights. Telstra used this feature by geotargeting ‘treats’ to people within a 5km radius of particular stores (also timed to lunchtime, and the morning and evening commute). This meant people got offers based on where they were and what they liked – a cheap coffee from a nearby cafe, or a discount on handbags from a shop down the road. The creative was engaging and made the proximity of the offer clear. Give the people what they want.
3. Make it worthwhile
You might find this creative a little cluttered. But then again, you’re probably not a teenage boy. Nutri-Grain made their ads very hard for their target audience to ignore by offering them something valuable: in this case, a daily chance to win a GoPro. The benefit of the ad is immediately clear, and the call to action straightforward.
4. Make it polite
You don’t have to yell. Our Lightbox format is an alternative to interstitials that allows you to register your point without annoying your audience. If people like what they see, they can hover over your ad – and then be drawn into a much deeper engagement. People who view lightbox ads are four times more likely to engage with a brand (such as by clicking through to a website) than standard ads. NAB enticed people with an unobtrusive invitation to discover “Tips and tools for your business” that people could follow through to videos, a business plan template and a cash flow calculator. Your mum was right: play nice.
5. Make it useful
Our lives are made of micro-moments. And if you as a marketer can be there for someone in their moment of need, you will be remembered. In New Zealand, Pedigree created an app for dog owners in that moment of dire need: a lost dog. If a dog went AWOL, an ad was served to everyone in a 2.5km radius alerting them to the missing pooch. The ad was clear, actionable and genuinely useful.
Easy, targeted, worthwhile, polite and useful. It’s not rocket science. But it’s often done wrong. Mobile screens are unique environments and deserve special attention. When it comes to creative, you need to think, not shrink.
So Alex, I’m with you on mobile ads. Small is not always beautiful. But it should be.
- Lisa Bora is head of mobile at Google Australia
Is this a serious defence of mobile?
‘Life is full of micromoments’?
‘Make ads polite’?
‘Small is not always beautiful’?
It feels like a grab-bag of subjective, unfounded opinion.
How about some stats that showed it to be a highly effective medium?
Or some ads that were awarded or even interesting?
This has not moved the argument forward one iota….
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Lisa, that article is fantastic. It seems really simple but so many people find it hard to get their heads around, thanks for taking the time and effort to write!
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Loving the conversations about mobile creative, been a long time coming.. great points well made Lisa
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Roll on ad-blocking technology.
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@Paul Eveleigh
How do you think the websites with quality content are funded?
Assuming you’;re happy to pay a subscription fee for every site you want to visit?
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@Lisa. Step in the right direction Lisa, we might not be near a perfect world for mobile creative just yet but as long as we are all making the right sounds. The above takes into account all stakeholders working together which has been a fundamental issue in production for digital for a very long time. Client/Media/Publisher/Creative…. lets solve that link 🙂
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@Paul Eveleigh you do realise you are reading a website at no cost to yourself due to advertisers partly funding the business model and in other cases entirely funding it? A rather naive statement considering this is a site for people in the industry that should know better.
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To those asking whether Paul Eveleigh doesn’t understand that ads pay for sites, I refer you to (journalist) Charles Arthur: (https://theoverspill.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/the-adblocking-revolution-is-months-away-with-ios-9-with-trouble-for-advertisers-publishers-and-google/)
“what about the moral dimension? The fact that if you block the ads, the sites lose their income?
I’ve previously written that the two sides on this are far apart; that adblocking is the new speeding: those who do it can justify why to themselves, while those who think it’s wrong are stern in their disapproval.
Entertainingly, when I noted on Twitter how many trackers I’d blocked using Ghostery (as part of an experiment using Ghostery, AdBlock, Javascript Blocker and uBlock to see how it changed my browsing experience), I was at once the object of finger-wagging and the accusation of the destruction of journalism:
@GeorgeBouras @charlesarthur And perhaps be done with quality media and journalism while you’re at it. Have you no responsibility to them?
— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) July 26, 2015
Have I any responsibility to them? Well, not really. Certainly as a standard reader, here’s what happened: I accepted an invitation to read an article, but I don’t think that we quite got things straight at the top of the page over the extent to which I’d be tracked, and how multiple ad networks would profile me, and suck up my data allowance, and interfere with the reading experience. Don’t I get any say in the last two, at least?
Hence my response:
@jeffjarvis @GeorgeBouras I think it’s dangerous to think that readers must, or will, tolerate anything advertisers demand.
— Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) July 26, 2015
(You can view the entire conversation if you’re logged in to Twitter.)
Print evolved. Now it’s the web advertisers’ turn
This is the part of the debate that so interests (and, frankly, entertains) me. Print-based organisations were told they needed to evolve, and stop being such dinosaurs, because the web was where it was at: advertising was moving, and if they didn’t move too, they’d just die.
Now we’re all online, but somehow we’re meant to accept that web advertising is how it is, and never question or deviate from it? Nuh-uh. Why should web advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user habits? What’s sauce for the print goose is sauce for the online gander. I don’t recall the people who scolded me for using tracking detectors previously saying that everyone had to stick with print adverts because they made more money (which those ads still do).
Furthermore, any argument that tries to put a moral dam in front of a technological river is doomed. Napster; Bittorrent; now adblocking.
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Lisa Bora, interesting article. Am looking forward to Nutri Gain, Telstra, Hyundai and NAB entries in the Mobile Marketing Association 2015 The Smarties Awards Australia New Zealand. http://www.mmaglobal.com/smarties
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Ad blocking doesn’t work on native ads – the new frontier.
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Dear @Team Native,
I assume you are referring to content blocking extensions for iOS9?
Just so you know its done based on content, hence why its called “Content Blocking” so Native Ads can be blocked, as well as Video Ads… as pretty much anything that you like.
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Ad-blocking. The equivalent of content privacy. Ain’t karma a bitch.
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@the new speeding
Agreed wholeheartedly. We have people on this thread defending their apparent right to push, what is often a irrelevant, intrusive, print advert into my digital world. It uses up my bandwidth, slows down and worsens my experience. Forget print! Print is print! Stop serving up tut in my feed.
Intent v awareness. Purpose. Less is more.
The issues for big agency’s is that many are squandering their clients marketing dollars. Yep, still the old school business model, which charges for creative. Pay for performance agencies become true partners; one future agency model perhaps?
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@Alex and @ad-blocking. People pay for quality content. Print or online. Always have. Always will.
Who reads crap social media with purile ads?
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