Challenges and Opportunites in Advertising on Mobile Devices

A recent article in NYT points out the current state of ads in the mobile world. It seems that the mobile, as being a totally different animal from the desktop computing, has taken many tech giants by surprise. Big tech giants, like intel, google, Microsoft, etc saw their revenues drop as they all failed to capitalize on mobile. 

“At Google, the price that advertisers pay when people click on ads has fallen for a year. This is partly because, while mobile ads are exploding, they cost less than Internet ads; advertisers are still figuring out how to make them most effective. … Since its initial public offering, Facebook has lost half its value on Wall Street under pressure to make more money from mobile devices, now that six of 10 Facebook users log in on their phones.”

One challenge for these tech giants is to figure out how to make the ads more effective or less intrusive to the users. Facebook’s recent attempt to solve this issue involves showing ads outside the Facebook app. Second challenge is that, after users saw the ads, there is no way of knowing whether the users actually made the purchase. Google tried to change that by offering up coupon from the merchant so that once redeemed it means that the purchase was made.

The only problem with these two approaches from facebook and google is that it requires too much information from the users, hence, privacy issue. European government has asked Google limited the amount the information it can collect from the end user.

I argue that there will be a new brand type of advertising for mobiles, because the traditional advertising, such as display ads, is not very suitable for the screen size of the mobile device. Advertisers will have to come up with a new way to serve up the ads that are not intrusive and friendly to mobile. Instead, advertiser should make the ads more interactive with the users because the mobiles devices nowadays are mostly touchable. If the ads are interactive and touchable, the users will be more interested seeing them. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how ads in the mobile world shape up in the future.

Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/technology/in-mobile-world-tech-giants-struggle-to-get-up-to-speed.html?ref=technology&_r=0