How to advertise effectively with mobile?

Native advertising, video ads, location-based advertising - mobile advertising is taking off.This article appeared in the current issue of "Marketing & Communication". Order now A subscription and find out more exciting monthly information on the topics of marketing, communication, digital, media and education.-------------They are tinkering, fiddling, measuring, practicing new interplays, daring formats, sometimes classic, then in moving images or embedded as text: The big question of the right advertising format on mobile devices is currently causing a lot of thinking among specialized agencies. "The search for alternatives to classic display advertising can be motivated by a variety of reasons," says Sabine Müller, Senior Consultant at Namics 13, the digital communications agency of Namics AG. "Assuming declining click rates and an oversaturated penetration of the classic advertising market, native advertising is a valid alternative. This is because it promises higher acceptance and relevance and, as a result, higher dwell time and thus valuable interaction with the advertising company," she says.The clear premise for Native Advertising to be successful is good content, she says. "Exciting content that adds value and is useful at the same time forms the basis of this advertising format, similar to content marketing," says Sabine Müller.For Michael Baum, Managing Director of Stailamedia, the main question is which mobile formats are suitable for branding campaigns and are accepted by users at the same time. "Here, we rely primarily on in-page and in-stream video, both of which have a high level of acceptance. Our interactive HTML5 ads are also very popular because the user engages very intensively with the brand."Location-based advertisingLocation-based advertising (LBA) promises a wide range of possibilities. Sandor Laczko, Head of Switzerland at Adello, assesses the strength of this form of advertising: "Many advertising companies are active in a limited geographical area. For a shopping center or a tourist region, the scattering loss is massively reduced and thus the relevance of the campaign is increased if advertising is not done with a watering can, but locally. Anyone who has ever used a map application such as Google Maps knows how precisely mobile devices can be located. The need for advertising campaigns within flexible, geographically limited regions is therefore very great. Adello has developed "Engage Pass," a concept based on the LBA approach. The "Engage Pass" enables advertisers to store coupons directly on the smartphones of their target group within a predefined area. "Two approaches are possible for location-based advertising," says Ronie Bürgin, Senior Business Developer at Goldbach Interactive. "While targeting according to WLAN nodes offers a certain degree of accuracy, especially in urban centers such as Zurich's main train station, precise targeting with a local reference can be carried out at any location in Switzerland if GPS data is available. "According to Bürgin, these possibilities for location-based advertising are already very well developed in the digital Classified products such as local.ch and search.ch. One of these apps is installed on practically every Swiss smartphone and is used extensively. A second option are networks that contain apps and mobile sites with high local relevance. On such networks, classic mobile formats such as banners or medium rectangles can also be used for location-based advertising," explains Bürgin."Mobile First""For retailers, LBA is an efficient new channel to promote the point of sale," Michael Baum is convinced. "For locally targeted campaigns, wastage can be minimized and user acceptance is also extremely high." However, he says, it is difficult to expand larger reach. In addition to very highly frequented stores, there also need to be sufficient users who allow access to their location via the settings on their own smartphone. "Customers expect a seamless mobile experience, as international studies show," says Sabine Müller. "From the inspiration phase in the furnishing blog, to the information phase in the online store, to the follow-up phase after the purchase is completed via a satisfaction survey - all interaction points must optimally function according to the 'mobile first' approach." It will now be exciting to integrate paid advertising into the purchase cycle just described. Those who have already expressed an interest in the product range online can continue to be penetrated by personalized advertising, located via GPS when they approach the physical store, and lured into the store with a discount voucher.Personalized advertisingThe use of personalized advertising also opens up a new, exciting field for agencies specializing in mobile advertising and their customers. "Campaigns achieve the best advertising impact when they are perceived as relevant by the target group," says Sandor Laczko. "The better a measure incorporates the individual preferences of individual consumers, the greater its relevance for them. In addition to the advantage that personalized advertising minimizes potential wastage and protects the media budget, the end customer is not served ads that are irrelevant to him. To personalize mobile ads, large anonymized databases of mobile surfing behavior are collected, enriched with data from third-party sources, and analyzed in real time during ad retrieval. Laczko says: "Personal profiling is a big market, and there is also a lot of interest outside the advertising industry. Banks, for example, want to know whether a customer is solvent. Insurance companies are interested in risk behavior. Mobile is particularly suitable for this, because the aggregated data is of higher quality. "For Laczko, the development toward personalized advertising is therefore one of the most important trends in mobile advertising. Facebook, for example, recently updated its data protection rules. The social network wants to personalize its advertising more in the future.Cross Device Tracking"Personalized targeting of potential customers is the key to success, and not just in mobile advertising," says Michael Baum. "As with location-based advertising, the lower wastage and higher acceptance by users lead to greater efficiency. At Stailamedia, we therefore rely on our own data management platform for display and video. Over the course of the next year, we will also optimize our mobile campaigns using first-, second- and third-party data. "An important part of this is cross-device tracking, which is used to precisely realize the planned contact dose of mobile campaigns across different devices. Internationally, targeting and tracking of mobile campaigns is one of the most discussed technology topics in the digital advertising industry. In addition, Baum says, "Personalizing mobile advertising is much more difficult than in display because the cookie-based 'path to conversion' is missing."Popular videosFor Baum, it is clear that the consumption and distribution of video content on mobile devices will grow the most in the future: "Automated trading of digital advertising spaces plays an important role here, which also brings with it huge synergy potential. "Ronie Bürgin says: "As advertisers increasingly extend their video campaign to smartphones and tablets, video advertising has become a cross-screen issue. Currently, an unchanged version of the TV spot is mostly aired on the different channels, which effectively supports recognition." Since users also have usage preferences with regard to the devices, additional effects can be achieved by exploiting these individual strengths of the devices.Sabine Müller cites page optimization for mobile websites and online stores as an important future topic in the context of mobile marketing potential: "In addition to an appealing layout, the page requires editorial maintenance in line with current SEO guidelines. This is the only way to ensure top placement in organic search queries." From now on, Google search will indicate whether a page is optimized for mobile or not by displaying the "Mobile-friendly" note directly below the page URL.Attract attentionBürgin cites HTML5 technology and the associated rich media options as another important trend in mobile advertising: Such ad formats take mobile-specific navigation and, by enriching the content, offer new options to capture users' attention and generate involvement." With HTML5, the ad medium becomes a landing page, which is attractive for both the user and the publisher, he said.Rising StarSandor Laczko sees above all a further trend toward automated, data-driven advertising in real time: "We are consistently pursuing this path. Adello tracks over 1.2 billion smartphones and tablets worldwide. Today, we receive more than ten billion ad impressions from publishers every day. Ad impressions are offered to us every day." For each of these potential contacts, the Adello technology calculates whether it is a valuable impression that should be bought and booked, i.e. whether the user has sufficient affinity with the advertised product.Laczko has no doubts about growth in the mobile sector: "Within the new media, mobile is the big growth driver. Mobile ad spendings in Switzerland have increased fivefold since 2008. The fact that mobile advertising is increasingly becoming a rising star in the Swiss advertising market is not surprising in view of its widespread use: "Currently, 80 percent of the Swiss population owns a smartphone and/or tablet. There are more than ten million Internet-enabled mobile devices in use in Switzerland, and their owners can be targeted with advertising on smartphones and tablets.Author: Gregor Waser