Mobile ads have better recall rates than TV ads

How do you judge the impact of an advertisement? How do you find out if it was effective or not? In most cases, you go by brand recall - the ability of the customer to recall your brand after being shown the ad a few times. Until now, TV was considered the best medium to place ads as it had the highest brand recall rates. But mobile advertising has simply changed everything.

According to reports from analysts, mobile ads have higher recall rates than TV ads. At the recent Mobile Advertising Degree conference, the representatives of Verizon Wireless emphasized the same fact. They also added that despite being costlier, mobile ads are preferred over online ads because they have a phenomenal click through rate.

This is incredible. I’ll explain you why. First, TV has a huge reach. Second, ads in TV are so common that people no longer consider them a problem. Third, a TV screen is more fit for rich ads and watching an ad on a TV screen could be actually fun.

Now, let me compare this with mobile phones. First, a mobile phone, until now, is not considered a primary advertising medium. Second, ads in mobile are considered intrusive by many, so you can’t expect mobile advertisers to start sending ads to all and sundry. Third, watching an ad on a mobile screen, especially a low end mobile phone’s screen, is not exactly a great experience.

Going by what I’ve said above, anyone can say that the odds are stacked against mobile advertising. But guess what? Mobile ads have a phenomenal click through rate of 2% and more, which is way better than online ads.

Now, just imagine. If these kinds of results are possible right now, what could be the case in future when we have more high-end mobile phones, richer ad formats, improved technology, and most importantly, an open-minded society which is not averse to mobile ads? All I can say is one word – unimaginable.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising.

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Mobile phone could decide the future of your website

For long, you’ve worried about traffic, pagerank, and all other stuff for your websites. You tried a thousand other things to drive traffic to your sites and unless you are Darren Rowse, you know it’s just damn difficult. But things are about to change just a little bit.

Guinness has an annual event, a very popular one, which takes place across the globe every year. It’s called Guinness Toast. It’s already a very popular one, but Guinness thought of trying mobile marketing to increase its popularity further. So, it told consumers all over the world that they can join the event through their mobile phone. On doing so, they will become a member of the program instantly and get a free Guinness ringtone. Needless to say, the news spread like wildfire. Most importantly, the traffic to the site thegreatguinnesstoast.com went up significantly.

Thanks to high-end mobile phones that offer good mobile browsing experience to people, the number of people who browse the internet through their mobile phone is increasing slowly and steadily. What this means to you is that if you have a mobile friendly version of your site, or, even better, a mobile site, your chances of connecting to your readers become significantly high.

In future, we might as well have blog gurus teaching us how to drive traffic to our mobile sites. Who knows? Even Google might come up with pagerank for mobile sites. Get ready.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones, Mobile Web.

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Blyk to offer free mobile browsing?

Blyk is one of the few well known names in the world of mobile advertising. Especially, the way it has targeted the 16-24 age group for mobile ads is considered very good by a lot of people. In a recent insight discussion group with members, Blyk discussed a lot of issues. The most talked about issue, as you would have guessed from the title of this post, was free mobile browsing.

Blyk does this insight discussion group thing often enough to understand the needs of their core market and to adapt themselves to the evolving mobile advertising market.

In this recent discussion, one of the major gripes was the youth’s need for a shortcut to information. As of now, text messaging (SMS) and MMS are the most sought-after ways to reach out to teenagers. Young people are swift in responding to such ads and the success rate has been pretty good so far. But the catch is mobile internet / mobile browsing. If they click on a link which takes them to a mobile site, they have problems viewing it because of two reasons.

1) Mobile browsing costs are way too high and young people, at least most of them, don’t have a regular income, which makes them reluctant to click on the links sent by advertisers.

2) A lot of them don’t have high-end mobile phones which offer rich browsing experience. So, browsing in general becomes a little tougher.

Now, the second reason can somehow be overlooked. The reason being – if I got a link in a mobile ad which could take me to a site where I can download latest ringtones for free, I wouldn’t complain a lot about my poor browsing experience, as long as it is good enough to get the job done.

But the first point is very important. So, in the discussion group, one point which was often raised was about offering free browsing to customers. This, no doubt, would encourage a lot of people to click on the links and check out what the advertisers have on offer, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. The data charges for browsing are quite high and Blyk should think of a strategy to cover its costs if it were to provide its customers with free browsing. What could be the solution? We don’t know as of now. But, as I always say, stay tuned.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones, Blyk.

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The role of mobile video in mobile advertising

Among the different options that are available in mobile advertising - which include text messaging, banner ads, mobile video, mobile TV, mobile audio (ring back tone), and mobile internet ads – text message is the most preferred and the most used form, as it is the only service available in all kinds of mobile phones. However, mobile video and mobile TV are far more engaging and effective in advertising and the only reason they are not used as often as they should have been is the poor quality of mobile videos and the low number of users with mobile phones that support such facility.

As you know, not every mobile phone is as good as the iPhone when it comes to mobile videos and mobile internet, which makes it difficult for mobile advertisers to go that route. However, according to M:Metrics, the number of people who watch mobile videos has increased steadily over the last year or two, which is an encouraging news for mobile advertisers.

According to its statistics, last year alone, some 9 million people in the U.S. watched some kind of video on their mobile phones. People are most interested to watch movie trailers, music videos, sports updates, weather reports, comedy, celebrity news, cartoons, and TV shows.

The statistics tell us a story. People are interested to watch videos on their mobile phone, but the thing that stops most people from doing so is either poor video quality or the high price charged by some of the carriers to watch videos.

Two things need to be done. First, more and more high-end mobile phones with facilities like video, mobile TV, and mobile internet should be introduced in the market, of course at an affordable rate. Second, mobile advertisers should partner with carriers to provide ad-funded mobile content like mobile TV and mobile video for free. While both these things cannot be done overnight, they will definitely see the light of the day in the coming days.

Categories: Cell Phone Advertising, All things mobile phones.

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