This is what successful mobile campaigns look like

MOBILE ADVERTISING The mobile boom continues unabated. In Switzerland in particular, practically every everyone has a smartphone or tablet. What does this mean for advertising opportunities? Four experts describe their experience with mobile advertising - and reveal the tricks of the trade when it comes to targeting and tracking. This article appeared in the May issue 2015 of "Marketing & Communication". For Immo Hütte, head of Switzerland at Tradedoubler, the success factors for a successful mobile campaign are clear: "There must be a clear strategy. The user is not interested in whether he is surfing via mobile or desktop - this distinction only exists for the advertiser. For the user, the focus is on the experience, no matter how, when, or where they surf." The user experience must be well thought out and mobile optimized throughout the entire journey, from the ad to the landing page to the shopping cart. Easy navigation and fast paths and search functions are key to success, he said, as users will abandon the app very quickly if landing pages are poorly implemented on mobile. "That's why many vendors are working toward getting the user to download an app," Hütte notes. This, he says, offers much better opportunities for a targeted and sustainable approach, as well as a better user experience.Multiscreeners instead of channelsRonie Bürgin of the Goldbach Group says that the longer a campaign is focused on a single channel, the more it runs the risk of no longer reaching all users: "A Swiss user uses an average of 2.8 mobile devices and in most cases also a desktop or notebook. These devices are used situationally, which is why we increasingly have to talk about multiscreeners rather than channels." In a mobile advertising campaign, he emphasizes two starting points. The strategy can be geared toward synchronizing advertising media or toward mobile-optimized advertising media: "The synchronization approach is about controlling the sequence of advertising media during a session, for example, having a banner follow an interstitial. As a rule, this means that a classic mobile banner follows a large-format advertising medium such as an interstitial or an overlay rectangle." The approach of mobile-optimized advertising media involves the use of advertising media that support the typical mobile navigation - swiping or tapping. This form of navigation has been learned by users and has become an intuitive behavior. Accordingly, so-called rich media advertising media based on html5 must be used for this approach." The strategy here is to motivate the user to interact with the advertising medium for the first time and to involve him via diverse content, says Bürgin. Of course, moving image content is also particularly suitable for this.Focus on user experienceAsked about a successful example, Leonardo Kopp of Admazing cites the Vögele campaign: "It used mobile, local coupons via Apple's Passbook app. In addition, the ability to 'swipe' was used elegantly and sensibly. It was an attention-grabbing campaign and arguably unobtrusive due to good capping." He said there are always exciting ads or campaigns that rely on videos, swipe cube ads or gamification. Integration with data and apps also leads to impressive effects time and again. "Smartphones offer a lot of possibilities for a great user experience," Kopp finds. "The control options, sensors, cameras and wealth of data leave little to be desired for creative advertisers. Ideally, however, these elements should not only serve the effect, but should be meaningfully integrated into the campaign idea. Then users will also engage with the advertising, even if ads on mobile devices have a greater potential for disruption than on desktop PCs." The technical implementation is very central, which is still more demanding on mobile than on stationary campaigns: "Pixelated or cut-off images, functionless buttons and various bugs are relatively common and destroy even the best campaign idea.Simplicity as a success factorTobias Zehnder, Head of Innovation and co-founder of Webrepublic, liked a campaign during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: "It convinced me because it was very simple and smart at the same time. Beer brand Estrella Damm deployed Promoted Tweets targeting the show's audience, answering a question that probably haunts most congress attendees: Where should I eat today? Thanks to one of these tweets, I found a great restaurant," he says, citing simplicity, targeting, context and landing page as factors in the campaign's success: "The cost of this campaign may have been very low, but it certainly left a very positive impression on many attendees. The targeting of the Promoted Tweets was simple but effective: Estrella Damm targeted all users who were in Barcelona and had either submitted tweets with #mwc15 or searched for the hashtag." The tweets would have taken into account the context of the target audience: Many of the trade show attendees are unfamiliar with Barcelona's great restaurant scene. "And the landing page offered users exactly what they expected: A Google Map with recommended restaurants - so with a tap on the screen, the directions to the restaurant could be called up immediately. "Targeting enables advertisers to understand the context of the target group more precisely: "Factors such as location, time of day or weather can be used to play out ads that are highly likely to address an acute, concrete need of the target group," says Zehnder.

of the mobile owner can be used to address him specifically.Understand context"Targeting for mobile is slowly getting off the ground, but still lags far behind traditional online options," says Ronie Bürgin. Re-targeting strategies in the context of normal campaigns are still quite complex, with rather modest results. The situation is different with app retargeting: "There are sophisticated options for this, which require that the app publisher has done his homework and therefore has a corresponding database. For each installation, the app publisher receives a MobileID that is unique and defines the respective device. For this MobileID, the app publisher can now store additional characteristics about app usage, analogous to a CRM entry." Furthermore, there are possibilities in mobile targeting on a technical basis, says Bürgin: "An advertiser wants to ensure the quality of a moving image ad, for example. This can be guaranteed if a mobile user is logged into a WiFi at the time the ad is shown. "A third targeting option has to do exclusively with subtlety. Bürgin gives an example: "Target group: all users of the 20Minuten app. When they are in Zurich, Lucerne or Zug at the lake basin. When: From 3 to 5 p.m., and only in good weather. If these criteria apply, a coupon for an ice cream is played to the respective user."Direct approach"Mobile devices are enormously relevant for targeting, as mobile usage is constantly increasing and users generally carry at least one mobile device with them most of the time," says Immo Hütte. This means that they can be localized very precisely, which makes it possible to address them with offers from the user's immediate current surroundings, for example. "But also the temporal addressing of the user via the second screen enables a completely new type of interaction. For example, online activities can be combined and timed with TV campaigns, which experience shows leads to a significant increase in sales," says Hütte.On the importance of landing pages, Tobias Zehnder says: "It depends on the platform and the goal of the campaign. If a user is supposed to get to a company page to learn more about a product, subscribe to a newsletter, take part in a contest, the landing page must necessarily be optimized for mobile devices." That means: as little text as possible, easily recognizable and easy-to-use buttons are indispensable. It becomes interesting, he says, when landing pages make intelligent use of the specific capabilities of smartphones, such as environmental sensors, GPS or camera: "Estrella, for example, skillfully relied on the navigation applications in smartphones."Importance of the landing page increasesSince Google has been giving greater weight to the mobile presence in the rankings since April, the importance of a landing page plays an even greater role, says Ronie Bürgin: "Basically, an Html5 advertising medium is already a landing page. However, unlike a landing page, the advertising medium cannot be included in Google's index. The advertiser must focus on the essentials with regard to the mobile landing page. Replicating an existing online process is not purposeful because the use of a mobile device is different. The advertiser must concentrate on offering and querying the most necessary via a mobile landing page." In this respect, the "call-to-action" already plays a central role in the actual advertising material. If the user sees no good reason to click on an ad, hardly any traffic is generated to the landing page.Find balanceWhen it comes to tracking on mobile devices, Tobias Zehnder talks about major challenges: "On the one hand, advertisers want to be able to establish a link between desktop and mobile. If we know that a user has searched for a record store on his desktop, we want to be able to play him an ad if we know that he is currently in the vicinity of such a store and is Googling for shopping opportunities." He said the major platforms are working on solutions, some of which are already working very well. "But in doing so, we also have to be careful that users don't feel tracked across platforms; for us as advertisers, that means finding the right balance between targeting and casualness." Advertising should never be intrusive, he said, but should always be relevant. That's especially true on mobile devices, he said.Author: Gregor Waser