Mobile ads have little lasting appeal
A survey of smartphone users suggests mobile advertisements are forgettable and ineffective. Then again, they might still be working.
The claim comes in a survey of 1,014 British smartphone owners. It was carried out for Azullo, a company that offers “in-content brand engagement across premium publishers,” so it’s fair to say it doesn’t have much interest in pushing the message that everything is working out just fine with mobile ads.
Anyhow, the results said that only 21 percent of people can recall seeing even one specific advertisement on their smartphone in the past six months. Of these, 53 percent said they couldn’t remember exactly what brand or product was being advertised.
Only 14 percent said that not only could they remember what was being advertised, but that it made them more likely to buy. Of course, few people admit to being influenced by any form of advertising.
Perhaps more worryingly for mobile advertisers, 34 percent said the ads they’d seen were simply not memorable, while 39 percent said the ads appeared not to have been adjusted to fit a small screen and were thus visually distorted.
81 percent of all the respondents agreed that advertisers weren’t doing enough to make their mobile ads effective. (That doesn’t necessarily mean they want the advertisers to do so…)
Mobile advertisers do seem caught in a quandry with phone screens. Simply scaling down website banner ads reduces the impact at best and creates a visual mess at worst. However, more intrusive and bolder ads such as full-screen displays that appear before a page loads can be so disruptive as to annoy the customer and put them off the product.
Facebook recently appeared to conclude that there’s no simple way to solve this on its own mobile site and applications. Instead it’s decided to farm out user data to other companies and let them take the heat if the ads annoy users.
