Crisp Voices Blog

Build Better Mobile Ads

17 Mar 2010 - Xavier Facon

Steve Jobs says "Mobile Ads Suck". (Pardon the expression. His words ... not mine.) He apparently said this to a source of a BusinessWeek article earlier this year. I need to agree with him. Many ad campaigns are indeed poorly executed, with slim banners and little ad content.

So, what needs to happen to make mobile display advertising better? We have a couple of ideas that I will briefly exlain in this blog post. But first, let's be clear about something. Some mobile display ad campaigns are amazing. Crisp is currently serving a gem of an ad unit for advertising new Intel processors.

The ad unit is a collaboration between various ad technology companies who are each doing what they do best. Crisp Wireless is involved as the rich media platform that ensures compatibility with various device versions, serves the ad, tracks every event on the unit and reports on user engagement through a rich reporting interface. This interactive ad expands from a non-intrusive banner ad and employs drag and drop input for the consumer to engage with the message. The ad lets the user answer a series of questions to discover the processor that is right for them according to the chosen answers. Take a look at the video to see what you think or check it out live on CNN Mobile or CBS Mobile.

So how can you build better mobile ads?

1. Use HTML/CSS/JavaScript: Basic banners are out. We believe, to make for compelling advertising, these richer technologies need to be leveraged. There is no need to wait for Flash.

2. Make the advertising SDKs in applications compatible with these web technologies. This Intel ad, runs both on mobile web and within iPhone applications.

3. Track the events created by the consumers interactions. Because the ad is built in JavaScript every event can be captured.

4. Invoke the ad client-side. In other words, use a JavaScript invocation system for that ad. This allows the browser to load the page first and the ad later. This seemingly small change allows ads to be much larger in terms byte size without impacting the user experience negatively.

5. Keep the consumer on the mobile web site of the publisher or in the application. With these richer ads, all the ad content can be conveyed without taking the user out of the experience.