Five Steps to Making Mobile Ads More Effective

Summary

In 2016, the ARF’s “How Advertising Works, Today” (HAW) project demonstrated the importance of optimizing ad creative for each platform and showed that the majority of multi-platform ad campaigns did not do that.  Given the rapid growth of mobile advertising, the ARF continued HAW research in 2017 with the goal of finding out how to develop creative that provides a positive, integrated ad experience for the mobile consumer. The presentation describes research conducted with Nielsen, Google, and Merchant Mechanics, including two original experiments using neuroscience-based methods that examined different ad formats and the role auf audio.  The key findings and recommendations:

• Brand early (Mobile seems to work differently than TV where viewers are more willing to watch a story unfold with branding towards the end.)
• Do not disrupt the consumers experience (This finding is consistent with other studies conducted for the HAW project that suggests benefits from aligning with the ad context.)
• Provide incentives (The research indicates that mobile incentives work similar to old-timey “cents-off’ coupons)
• Give consumers control (Pop-up ads failed on every dimension: less exposure, negative opinions about the ad, increased desire to block ad.)
• Audio auto-play exemplifies denying consumers control. It annoys consumers and is likely to render the ad ineffective and, in addition, it likely hurt mobile advertising in general.