Why don’t people understand Mobile Advertising?
17 April, 2009
So the Wall Street Journal released an iPhone application on the 15th April. Lots of people are talking about the fact that you can get WSJ content without subscribing, which is great, and it’s not a bad little application.
However, their foray into mobile advertising within the iPhone app itself isn’t so successful, with three big issues:
1. Poor Placement
The mobile ad stays at the bottom of the screen the whole time, taking up precious vertical screen real estate. More importantly because it is always in the same place, people will start to block it out over time and it will just annoy them. It’s also in the same place on deeper pages.
Recommendation: Embed the ad in the content just above the screen fold and let it move with the content list.
2. No Call to Action
The text (on this ad) reads “Oracle #1 Business Software Company”. Why would I want to click on that mobile ad? There’s no incentive, there’s no education apart from a branding message, and while that might be of some value, it could be much more useful. Remember, this person is reading the news, the ad needs to motivate them away from that to engage them.
3. Ad Takes Me Out of the Application to a Normal Web Page
When I do click on the ad, it takes me out of the WSJ iPhone application and into the Mobile Safari web browser. This isn’t great, as it means that I’ve got to return to the iPhone home menu and relaunch the WSJ app to get back to what I was reading. Even worse though is that that it takes me to a generic web page about Oracle that isn’t formatted for the mobile device, let alone the iPhone.
Recommendation: Ensure that the customer stays within the application and resulting content is iPhone specific. This doesn’t take much work and results in a much better user experience. Admob have a range of better iPhone advertising user experiences and I’m sure there are other companies out there that do too.
This isn’t rocket science people, and it has the effect of creating a bad user experience for those people engaging with mobile advertising, who will be less likely to engage with mobile advertising in the future. The mobile industry is moving more toward relying on advertising revenue and this sort of campaign doesn’t help. Nor is it likely to result in a great response for the advertiser who is also less likely to invest if they’re not getting much response/engagement.
Outcome
Customer doesn’t have a good experience and is less likely to engage with mobile ads in the future.
Brand doesn’t get the response they potentially could and might not invest as heavily in the future.
Technorati Tags: advertising, customerexperience, iphone, marketing, mobile, ui
About a year ago the ABC interviewed me about being a Usability Specialist. They came and videoed me up at the usability lab I use, my home office and even speaking at a conference. It was all quite fun.
Anyway, today I accidently found a photo of myself on the ABC Science website with a link to the interview with me. You can read about my job and watch the video interview here
Technorati Tags: business, customerexperience, hci, idealinterfaces, industry, information architecture, interview, iphone, marketing, mobile, Sydney, thoughts, TV, ui, usability, video
iPhone Tech Talk in Sydney & Melbourne
10 October, 2008
Last night I bought Domain Names
5 May, 2008
So over the weekend I was thinking about things, specifically around the amount of work I am doing in the field of mobile user experience. My consulting business, Ideal Interfaces (old site & blog), is doing very well and will definitely keep on going, but there is also a need to more clearly brand the mobile work that I am doing.
With that in mind I bought www.mobileuxp.com and www.mobileuxp.com.au (nothing there yet) to provide a digital home for my mobile focussed thoughts and experiences. Although the term won’t be overly familiar to most, UXP is a common abbreviation for ‘User Experience’ and it’s relatively short 
Let’s see where this goes…
Update: After writing this post I realised I should have bought MobileCXP as well, for Mobile Customer Experience. So I got www.mobilecxp.com and .com.au…
Update 2: Then I thought maybe mobilecustomerexperience.com is also available, and it was. So now I have it and .com.au as well
Now which one to use as the main one?
Technorati Tags: business, customerexperience, idealinterfaces, marketing, mobile, Sydney, thoughts, ui, usability
