Achieving Mobile Advertiser Goals – Best Practices and Trends - Eswar Priyadarshan, CTO

You probably have been deluged by a surfeit of 2010 Predictions in Advertising, Mobile and Mobile Advertising by now. But nobody is really trying to break it down for you, the Agency or Advertiser, in terms of what’s worked before and what’s going to work in the brave new world of mobile ads. Your primary concern has always been, and will always be, getting to the right customer for your brand or for your client – you absolutely need to get past blind impressions and empty clicks and instead focus on actual engagement and conversions. This article is an attempt to capture key mobile ad best practices from the many branded and direct response campaigns that have run through the Quattro Wireless Ad Platform in the past year – with an eye to leveraging newer devices, network capabilities and evolving ad industry trends.

Let’s begin with consumer and industry trends -- all the research we’ve seen this year shows that more and more consumers are moving their media consumption to their mobile devices, and that their engagement with brands and response to direct marketing on those devices is much higher than in any other measurable digital medium.  No matter whom you are trying to reach – gamers, moms, business execs, in-market auto buyers – you can target them effectively on the mobile web and in applications, at scale. Your competitors are already leveraging the reach and targeting capabilities of mobile, so if you are not, you are at a disadvantage.

To make the most of your mobile investment, you need to focus on the whole experience that the consumer will have with your brand – everything from the site your message appears on, to the form of the message itself (banner, rich media, integrated sponsorship…), to what happens after the click.  We find that the most successful marketers and advertisers are those that strategically align their brand and message with the right content and the right consumers to drive brand impact, conversions and ROI.  For example, our network data shows that using rich media will drive a higher response: animated ads provide a 56% lift over static banners, and expanding ads provide a 10% lift (and also generate on average 2+ page views within the expanded ad).  

Once the consumer does engage with the ad, the true measure of a campaign comes from what happens next – if they are engaging with the landing page or site. We recently ran a campaign for Sony for the launch of RockBand on PlayStation Portable (PSP) that included a microsite with a direct link to Amazon for purchase, game overviews and video – and nearly 100,000 consumers engaged with the site and the brand. If there’s one message to be conveyed by this article with regards to the future of mobile advertising, it’s precisely this – the winners in this astonishingly powerful medium will be those (platforms, networks and advertisers) that think beyond the click.
It’s time to get a bit more concrete about specific techniques and strategies. We will use the classic Awareness to Loyalty marketing and merchandizing funnel to help motivate our examples.

Awareness: Mobile inventory encompasses a lot of mobile web, rapidly catching up mobile App, smaller but growing mobile video and SMS. You are well advised to at least cover the mobile web and App with consistent branding and messaging (not just within mobile but across media) plus I would encourage you to build upon that messaging with additional Rich Media creatives and execution (expandables, interstitials, video, accelerometer and map integration and the like). The keys are (a) consistency – brand studies have shown that campaigns that focus on a single message outperform peers that try a wider message mix and (b) leveraging the far greater suite of creative capabilities on platforms such as the iPhone and Android.
 
Consideration and Preference: Why would someone care about your brand or offer? You have to make yourself relevant – and understand that with mobile, since you literally are competing with the hundreds of round-the-clock sensory inputs a consumer is receiving as they are out and about – you have to work that much harder to stand above the noise and shout out relevance. Relevance is about precise targeting – Quattro’s Q  Elevation^TM platform provides mobile specific targeting capabilities ranging from contextual, to carrier and device profile, to demographic and location and all the way to mobile behavioral patterns. Relevance is also about a great user experience tailored at the specific device, network and App or Site experience.
 
Most if not all successful campaigns on the Quattro network have a fairly sophisticated set of targeting parameters by geo, demo, device, OS, day-part, location and some level of behavioral pattern. Additionally, the more awareness-oriented campaigns combine the targeting sophisticating with great user experiences for the Ad Units themselves.
 
Experience: If you are a Commerce or Direct Response advertiser, here’s the chance to hook ‘em into a sign-up, a phone call or a purchase. Branded advertisers use this moment to provide a compelling brand introduction or vignette. In all cases, assuming that your creative was appealing, the targeting and relevance was right, you need to get the consumer to actually engage and transact as rapidly and successfully as possible.
 
No ‘lunch bag let-downs’ in mobile – you’ll find people will never click on your ad again if they feel they were led down a dead-end before – where a dead-end could mean a slow page load, too many confusing clicks, a video that did not play, lots of typing required with a limited mobile keyboard or a click-to-call phone number that just put them on hold for a while.
 
Loyalty: Loyalty means any type of ongoing relationship with a consumer who has interacted with your ad at any level. Perhaps she watched the video on make-up tips but never signed up for the text club. Perhaps he clicked on the $2.99 version of your App and decided to pass. Or could be a perfectly good-news scenario of a consumer who clicked on your Auto ad, found the dealer locater and called for a test-drive appointment. Quattro provides a set of Post-Click Analytic tools and re-targeting capabilities to enable you, the Advertiser, to decide what to do next.
 
All three situations above involve some element of non-PII unique visitor tracking and analysis of just what the visitor did with your offer. Additionally, there’s an element of Segmentation – the ability to bucket users as drop-offs, successful sign-ups etc. Finally, there’s the ability to create and execute a new campaign that specifically speaks to these new Segments with follow-on offers – target the Free version of your App to the Segment who declined your $2.99 version, a Brand Satisfaction survey for the Segment who signed-up for the test-drive and a free-make-up-sample-if-you-join-the-text-club offer for the Segment who watched the make-up tips video but did not sign up for the text club.

Mobile advertising is a rapidly evolving medium. However, certain core principles continue to hold true in terms of Best Practices – a consistent message, innovation within the boundaries of the message, an acute need for targeting and relevance and finally, many opportunities for post-click analytics and re-targeting.