Mobile advertising is a fairly common subject here on MobHappy, thanks largely to my esteemed colleague Russell’s role at AdMob and his interest in the industry. The ad mechanism that it and many other players in the space, like Third Screen and Google, use is a familiar one: a mobile equivalent of a text link or banner ad. There are, of course, plenty of other ways to get ads on a mobile; perhaps the most common — and most annoying — is SMS spam. We all know the drill: you get a new message notification, open up the inbox, and see an ad for ringtones, a payday loan, or something else you don’t want.
Apparently, though, there are some companies that think this is a good template to follow for mobile advertising, and are working to deliver interruptive advertising to users’ mobile devices. It’s not spam, but rather “idle screen ad insertion.” Users download an application and give the companies some demographic information, then their idle screens get hit with supposedly targeted ads. The companies say their approach is superior to using mobile web ads, because just 30 million or so people in the US use their phone’s web browsers. One of them adds that it can throw location data into the mix, allowing — you guessed it — users to get a coupon from a coffee shop when they’re nearby.
The pointlessness of that trite example is well established. But is the idea of popping ads up onto users’ idle screens really a great idea? The idea that ads need to be impossible to ignore, by whatever means necessary, is one that’s increasingly outmoded. Users are doing things like skipping TV commercials with their DVRs and they’re running AdBlock in their web browser, and that’s in addition to all the ads they see but don’t pay attention to.
An important consideration for mobile ads, from the consumer’s standpoint, will be their level of intrusiveness — or, put another way, how easy they are to ignore. For instance, look at the ads Google runs on its search pages. They’re there, and easily accessible, but they’re also easy for a user to ignore and don’t get in the way of the user experience. A user can scan over them quickly, see if any are attractive, then choose whether to engage or ignore them. Same for minimalist mobile web ads – but not so for idle screen ads. Think about SMS spam, or bluespamming: every one requires some sort of user interaction, getting the user to open the inbox and/or message, then read it over and delete it (or, perhaps, respond). Will idle-screen ads be that different?
Services like Blyk, or Virgin Mobile USA’s Sugar Mama try to grab users’ attention by offering free service in exchange. That might work, but it doesn’t seem likely to succeed when advertisers don’t have anything tangible to offer users. The companies doing these idle screen ads think that the ads themselves will be useful to consumers because they’ll be targeted, but that’s a stretch. The only sort of “targeting” that can do this is when consumers invite specific brands or products into a relationship — which is the exact antithesis of interrupting them with idle-screen ads sold to the highest bidder.
Update: Just spotted this and thought I’d tack it on, but congrats to Russell and the rest of the AdMob crew, as they’ve just announced they’ve served a billion ads in under a month, which is quite a milestone.
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