Rethinking Mobile Ads

A New York Times article today has some interesting information about the current state of mobile advertising.  In the early days of mobile, just like in the early days of the internet, advertisers would basically just take the same types of ads that they were used to displaying in other media, slap them onto a web page or app, and be done with it.  Now, however, advertisers are beginning to get wise to the benefits of tailoring ads to the types of behaviors people are most likely to engage in while using their mobile phones.

For example, Google is displaying search ads with a direct link to place a phone call to local businesses - taking advantage of the fact that much of the time, when people make a search on a mobile device, they are looking for something right now.  Google says that 30 percent of restaurant searches and 25 percent of movie searches are made on mobile devices.  This strategy has been very successful - Starwood Hotels started using this type of advertising and saw their online bookings increase by 20 percent in just one month!

Other companies have used other techniques to take advantage of mobile ads.  Facebook, for example, started placing ads in users' news feeds because their traditional display ads wouldn't translate well to their mobile app or site.  Twitter offers the capability to advertisers of only showing particular ads to mobile users.  Even Pandora has been using audio ads in their mobile app to promote specials at local stores - which, ironically, is basically the same thing that terrestrial radio has done for years.

Another type of ad mentioned in the article is one hinted at by Google recently.  By taking advantage of the new "Google Now" service, Google may start displaying unprompted ads in the notification window of Android phones.  This, I think, would be a bad idea.  I think that may cross the line into the territory of "too annoying" and may result in protests from users.  Then again, the additional opportunities that this would make possible may be worth a certain degree of ill will.  Either way, it will be interesting to see the other kinds of innovations that companies come up with to take advantage of mobile advertising.