Why is mobile advertising so important nowadays?
Your mobile phone is most likely the first and last screen you look at every day.
The amount of time spent using this device has increased significantly in recent years.
Indeed, some of us spend an average of over 4 hours a day on it.
In the past two years, mobile phone use has increased by more than 20 % due to the social media boom and COVID-19.
Knowing this, the importance of mobile advertising for a brand is quite obvious.
The importance of attention
One must always keep in mind that attention is crucial yet a variable piece of advertising success.
It is attention that determines ad engagement, brand awareness, and recall.
When people use their phones, countless things can distract them: notifications, calls and lots of content on social media…
For this reason, users’ attention to content on mobile phones is fragmented.
So messages on mobile need to be efficient and attractive as attention spans are short.
You have less than 3 seconds to grab users’ attention.
Nowadays, we live in a digital world of instant gratification, where speed is an indicator of quality.
If your mobile page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, the probability of users’ bouncing increases incredibly.
It follows, then, that it is important to keep the website functionality monitored.
As a marketer, your responsibility is to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the correct person.
Video as mobile advertising
Video ads perform better on mobile because they are twice as likely to create emotional responses than static ads.
I have already explained the importance of eliciting emotional responses because they have a strong effect on favorable brand associations.
MediaBrix, a leading mobile-focused digital advertising company, and True Impact, which provides insights into customer attention and emotion to Marketers, conducted a study to discover the most effective way to use video as mobile advertising.
The purpose was to test different mobile advertising solutions to understand which attributes attract the most attention.
Sixty participants took part in the study and had to watch two types of videos during a mobile game.
The first type is called Interstitial, or pop up: an ad type where a video pops up while a mobile game is being played.
The second type is called Embedded Opt In: an ad type that arrives at a point of need (i.e. you’re out of points), and offers a reward to allow the user to keep playing.
Users’ responses were measured by electroencephalography (EEG), heart rate and eye-tracking techniques.
Conclusions
This study highlighted two key aspects.
Mobile advertising that addressed an emotional moment (an indicator of need) and offered contextual relevance were four times more motivating than those that did not.
In addition, this type of ad generated eight times more cognitive engagement that led to mental encoding (memory commitment) and was more likely to be considered.
Mobile advertising is an effective tool that can reach many people at any time of the day, but marketers must be careful how they use it.
A very important aspect to consider is the format.
Many marketers talk about the importance of content.
However, the content of the ad would not reach the audience if presented in an intrusive way.
Any questions? Send me an email at mb@marcobaldocchi.com .
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