Why There’s A Huge Opportunity in Mobile Advertising
I’d say that now, more than ever, we live in a world that is increasingly less and less willing to accept that something can’t be done. That with the often mind-boggling advances in technology that have occurred over the past few decades, we live in a world that is increasingly less and less likely to admit defeat when they can’t figure out something.
And yet, while reading an article in Forbes today about mobile advertising and how it has yet to truly ‘proliferate’ as much much as it can — and worse, that it can’t — I couldn’t help but thinking that maybe not everyone feels that optimistically about the world around us. That maybe there are still some questions — such as the meaning of life itself — that we just may never be able to figure out the answers to.
But I think that those skeptics who believe that the mobile realm can’t become a huge area of opportunity for advertisers are wrong. I think mobile answering will be figured out, and here’s why.
Mobile is Unlike Anything Else
Part of the problem is that mobile is being treated as very much the same medium as web, television, and print when it comes to advertising. What I mean by that is that brands are still approaching mobile advertising in much the same way that they would web or print. So things like banner ads still proliferate because, frankly, they are what advertisers and businesses understand, and are one of the things that they can very easily translate onto a mobile platform.
Unfortunately, though normal advertising methods, including banner ads, work, they aren’t the most appealing when translated to the mobile experience. Having a tiny little ad on the bottom of an application is more annoying — and even invasive — than it is effective in convincing people to buy a product.
Good advertising is, more often than not, as attractive as it is capable of selling something. And currently, mobile advertising in its current iteration isn’t the most appealing thing. When you have only 3.5″ of screen real estate to work with, it’s hard to make an advertisement not seem invasive.
How Advertisers Will ‘Figure it Out’
But I think that the ultimate answer to that $20 billion question — projected mobile advertising spending in the near-future — will not be in trying to appeal to consumers in the same way that has, for decades, become tried and true.
Instead, the solution will be in creating experiences for consumers that will work to not only engage them — whether it be through a game or an application that allows them to interact with a product — but will also drive them towards the final goal of purchasing a product.
Though standard ads have and always will ‘work’, they are becoming less and less effective in a world where consumers are becoming increasingly smarter. The proliferation of information in this day and age has made it increasingly more difficult for brands to sell products to consumers on impulse.
And that’s why I firmly believe that more and more advertising money will be spent on things like mobile application development and other experiences that emphasize the important of being able to interact with brands and products. And I think these experiences will also become a core part of advertising platforms like Facebook and Twitter that, as of now, have been focusing solely on standard, run-of-the mill ads.
Will banner ads still exist? Absolutely.
But they won’t make up that more than $18 billion disparity between where the mobile advertising market is now, and where it should be.
Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester NY Social Media company specializing in advertising, web and graphic design, and SEO.