The advent of the mobile phone becoming a fundamental part of daily life has resulted in marketers and advertisers quickly having to adopt more mobile orientated mindsets.
HOW VIDEO WILL HELP DEVELOP MOBILE ADVERTISING
Effective advertising is based on doing something interesting and different. Content, outside of advertising, is presented in a variety of ways on mobiles, all of which allows users to have perfectly crafted tailored, and native, experiences. However, adverts specifically are not really achieving this. The reason for this is that many advertisers are still not putting the consumer first, at the forefront of their creative work.
But the creative work on mobiles will only ever succeed if the wider branded website is mobile optimised. Patricia Lopez, head of Havas Group’s Mobext, said “When we are looking at the experience, we have to look at the full picture. In our team, the creative people sit with the media people. Being able to manage both components and not keep them separate is quite important.”
RETURN ON INVESTMENT STILL AN ISSUE
Although desktop is an important medium by which consumers interact with brands, and adverts, the focus on desktop is at the detriment to mobile experiences. Daniel Rosen, Global director of advertising Telefónica, “As mobile becomes the dominant medium in digital, brands have to catch up and start to provide optimised experiences depending on the particular channel they are going on whether that’s a social channel like Snapchat, or their favourite newspaper.”
Something that has resulted in the focus being on the desktop experience over mobile is that there are still issues around metrics and measuring Return on Investment (ROI) for mobile campaigns. Different suppliers of mobile campaigns have different benchmarks, which means there is no industry standards to be compared against. “If you can’t track it, it doesn’t matter whether your campaign is a brand campaign or a direct response campaign. That is a huge challenge”, said Paul Mead, founder and chairman, VCCP Media.
DIFFERENT CONTENT FOR EACH PLATFORM
Brands create different content for every platform they use, so that each one delivers the best user experience possible. Brands need to respect both the different mediums and the differing consumer experiences when creating campaigns. Individual videos need to be created to suit each of the platforms that a brand wants to use as part of their campaign. The creation of platform bespoke videos ensures that the format and message are relevant and suitable to both the platform and its audience.
Brands will lose out on consumer engagement if they feel the format is not relevant to them. Alex Kozloff Director of marketing and industry engagement IAB UK, has noted that ‘content is getting better, as is the technology. Advertisers have plenty of options to produce creative that is fun, immersive and with the rise of geo-location services, targeted and personalised for the consumer.’
This type of targeting should allow advertisers, and brands, to interact with their target market in a more sophisticated way, creating a more enhanced advertising experience. This will help to build better brand loyalty as adverts become better and more engaging – less intrusive into people’s online experience.
SUMMARY
It is consumer behaviour that will help to develop the mobile advertising industry. Advertising will dovetail into consumer’s activities and locations, giving a more cohesive all round experience to consumers. This, in turn, will result in better video adverts.
From being more targeted and more specific to personal needs, to being more creative, video will push mobile advertising to an entirely new level of relevance and engagement.
All quotes from The Drum roundtable discussion, found here.
