The State Of Mobile Ads: Too Much Complexity, Not Enough UsabilityMobile advertising is about a $2 billion business, but a number of obstacles remain: carriers’ issues, fragmentation, and ultimately, convincing marketers to do a mobile campaign. Cyriac Roeding, SVP, CBS (NYSE: CBS), expressed a good deal of frustration about the state of mobile ads during a mid-morning panel at the AlwaysOn Media NYC. He began by offering some bullet points detailing what media companies and agencies need to satisfy to move the ball along:
– Three rules: Roeding said advertisers need to know why they need another medium. “If you can’t answer the question in 10 seconds, you should be out of the game, because without that medium, you’re lacking 18 hours a day.” But in order to turn that answer into a deal a media company needs to promise scale, massive page volumes. Offering his employer as an example, he claimed that CBS Sports had received 75 million mobile pageviews and 5 million uniques. The next step involves creating advertising opportunities that are unique to mobile. “If you see a mobile ad as you would an online ad or TV spot, you will fail. You wouldn’t put TV on a newspaper. Mobile TV is a marketing term. Don’t think for a minute that consumers want a traditional TV experience on mobile.” Clear measurement is the last point. Mobile Marketing association is working with IO to compare the effectiveness of mobile, TV and online, so Roeding expects progress on that front.
– Too much complexity: Roeding got a round of applause as he became more animated about the state of mobile advertising: There’s too much complexity in carriers’ packages - there are 20 carriers, two download standards… “Vcast offers mobile video as part of a $15 package on top of phone service - and then we all want to talk to advertisers and say ‘Try out mobile,
it’s really fun.’” His voice rose as he vented about usability and how the experiences of the PC cannot be transferred to the phone. “Too many mobile sites ask you to scroll through the next 15 menu items. Do you really want to go down 15 items on a mobile site so that you get another 10 items to choose from? No, you don’t because by then, your lunch time is over.”
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