People don’t generally want to click on banner ads online, click-through-rates are dropping and the medium only survives because nothing better has come along to take its place. The transfer of display ads onto mobile was a natural first step and, apologies to Admob et al, but I don’t think serving banner ads blind is going to cut it long term, whatever clever call to action you tack onto them.

When you are snacking on a small screen you want relevance. It’s nice to have some research to prove this, but I am not too surprised consumers don’t want to click on banner ads and wait for a new page to load. However, I think you have two ways to go with this, and Chris mentions one – you circumvent the ‘dumb’ banner ad problem with a clever and painless call-to-action.

That, in my opinion, is a ‘sticky plaster solution’ to the problem. The real holy grail of mobile ads must be intelligent contextual ads linked to behavioural targeting (which you then combine with the instantaneous and painless call to action that Chris hints at). It’s the way PC web ads are going, and it makes even more sense on mobile, where the device is much much more personal and very time and context sensitive.

The mobile phone has some unique characteristics; it’s yours and yours only and is with you all the time. Ads need to reflect this. My vision is this – ads are served to you according to what you are doing on your phone but are also linked to the time of day and where you are (and what you did in that context previously). In addition, they must offer an instant benefit that requires little to no additional effort.

Pie in the sky? Not really. Consider this: When I access my operator portal homepage, or my personal off-deck home page I can be recognised. The ad serving system can know it’s 6pm and has paid my operator to share where I am geographically and what I would normally click on at this point in the day (all technically possible, right, if opted in?). So imagine I normally check what’s on TV around this time (behaviour and attitude context), before I get to that TV link I am pushed an ad for a show on at 8pm that evening (time context) that is on my local channel (place context) and it offers me a Sky Set-Top box SMS scheduler for that show (which is a live service). This is auto-generated, I just click, almost momentarily it flashes up – programme set, and I then carry on to the TV listings. It turns out, it’s the best of a bad lot, so when I get back home, I watch the show.

So yes, an easy call to action is great, but to make that ad relevant to my mobile state is priceless!