Crisp Voices Blog

Swiper no Swiping! A Response to the ClickZ Review of Wired's iPad App Advertising

1 Jun 2010 - Tom Limongello

ClickZ to my knowledge is the first site to dedicate a 10 minute video (see below) to reviewing mobile ads. The fact that they reviewed only the Wired iPad app advertising in itself is worth noting in terms of how important the iPad is to advertisers and publishers. Since the video is long I’ll boil it down for you, they were unhappy with the lack of interactivity, and since there were so many ads in the app, and because print ads are not by nature interactive, it was probably really difficult for Wired’s sales team to do much. We’ve been a part of the process of digitizing print ads for iPad apps over the past two months and we thought it would be great to do a deeper dive into what’s in the Wired App and offer some perspective, pointers and thoughts on how advertisers could do better.

Whoa There.
It’s not easy to change creative without creative direction and it’s not easy to make an ad digitally rich unless you’re given the right assets--but, it’s not impossible. Although the ClickZ review was all about the negatives, I would give HBO, eTrade, and Lea & Perrins points for their creative use of gallery buttons. Ads like Lea & Perrins full page ad with hotspots make a flat print ad into something highly interactive. Also, leveraging learnings from mobile content delivery, we’ve been proponents of galleries because it takes big sets of content and makes it bite sized. If you play with the Lea & Perrins ad you are getting 12 recipes – however they are laid out with 12 buttons, and this much more fun to tap through than a list, especially because the text changes quickly using CSS + JavaScript transitions.
 
Swiper no Swiping!
Content is King, and what we’ve learned at Crisp is that as we work with App developers who leverage the Swipe feature, is that we cannot count on using swipe as a gesture within advertising. If mobile devices are about vertical scrolling, the iPad is about horizontal swiping. As Swiper the Fox might say to Dora the Explorer "You'll never find it now! Ha, ha, ha!!"
 
Note: we’ve also learned that swiping content does not load as fast as tapping for content, because Apple’s gestural technology is not smart enough to start loading at the beginning of a swipe, so quick taps onto a navigation arrow will actually perform the request to either the local file or to a server faster in every case.
 
Follow the Arrows
Intel and HBO got dings for not offering readers a clue to find the rest of their ads. Without adding navigation buttons on the creative it would be nearly impossible for users to know that there were three panels for each of these ads. Why is that? Well because the Wired iPad app uses horizontal scrolling, they decided to offer vertical scrolling to show the rest of the ad content. Other than us reviewers of ads, will anyone else ever change their behavior to see ad content?
 
Danger Zone
Samsung only offered a full screen in portrait, which looks bad in landscape. You have a choice here, offering a cube-sized creative in the safe zone, anything smaller than 660x660, would have saved Samsung.  In the absence of the right sized creative you need to offer something different in landscape than you do in portrait. Even if it doesn’t fit the screen perfectly, it’s better to make it look like you are doing it on purpose rather than just have the wrong sized ad swirl down the whitespace well when you turn your iPad to landscape. 
 
The punchline also got lost in the rotation on the Heineken ad. Heineken gets points for having a call to action for rotation, and offering ‘can I touch’ in portrait and ‘yes you can’ in landscape. However, you cannot touch anything in the ad. Hmmf.
 
Link-in, not Link Out
Most advertisers with embedded links didn’t use webview, so they left the app to show a microsite rather than render the landing page in the app. Use the webview.
 
What do you get the advertiser that has nothing? ClickZ offered a wake up call to Tissot who did not even put their website link in the ad, but clearly leveraged ‘connectivity’ in the ad copy, so it looked like they were paying lip service to interactivity. 
 
No Tracking, no Interactivity
Giving agencies the benefit of the doubt, they may have said, ‘Why do I want to offer cool features if I can’t track them?’ Does your iPad app have an SDK that can handle rich media interactions and offer dynamic reporting? We suggest using our HTML5 open web standards approach because it can leverage the same rich media as you serve on mobile web, iPad safari and even on your desktop site. 
 
The takeaway for me is that mobile advertising is now getting the spotlight, and the size of the creative is now full page, which is bigger than any digital creative we’ve ever seen before. There’s a bigger opportunity and a bigger margin for error.

 
 
 
[Title inspired by Dora the Explorer's Fox nemesis named Swiper (credit for the reference, Nathan Carver)]
 

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Comments

Your Thoughts on Our Thoughts on the Wired iPad App Ads

1 Jun 2010 — Kate Kaye (not verified)
Hey Tom,Thanks for posting about ClickZ's (long - but entertaining) video about the Wired iPad app ads. We thought that, because the Wired app was getting so much hype, it made sense to explore the advertising therein. Of course, we would have loved to have seen more innovative approaches to interactivity and recognize that it's early days for iPad app ads.You mention a Lea & Perrins "ad" in the Wired app that neither I nor my colleague and video commentary partner Jack Marshall thought was an ad. In fact, unlike the other ads, which are labeled as "advertisement"s in the app, that one wasn't. I liked the content and envisioned myself in the kitchen actually using it while making one of the recipes featured. And, while it does seem as though it could possibly be sponsored/advertorial content, it isn't an ad per se - at least doesn't seem to be since it's not labeled as such.Still, I think this approach is one other future iPad app advertisers should think about when developing campaigns.

Is that an ad?

1 Jun 2010 — Tom Limongello (not verified)
Hey Kate,Thanks for the comment. I do apologize for assuming that Lea & Perrins feature was an ad, my same thoughts hold true for HBO True Blood and Fidelity that both use galleries well, but here's why I assumed Lea & Perrins was also an ad:1) It didn't seem like Wired tech content, but now looking I do see that there is a technical bent, in terms of 'what's inside Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce'.2) It featured a bottle of Lea & Perrins, not just 'what's in Worcestershire Sauce', so it still looks like an advertorial.3) Most important, it used the same interactivity that the HBO: True Blood and Fidelity ads did with their image galleries. This sort of interactivity shows up in the Wired ads to start and then finally in some of the articles toward the end of the issue so again I assumed it was an ad because I started to get trained to think of pages with galleries as ads.BTW...I also just noticed that Wired's blue 'Start' box and blue ribbon that showed readers where to read and where to swipe would have been very helpful in those vertically stacked, 3 page ads for HBO, Intel and others. The last set of  house ads for the 'Wired Exchange' actually included navigation arrows (not interactive) which at least gives the readers a clue.