Keeping it simple
this piece was originally published in Mobile Marketing Magazine's September 2015 issue - http://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/
This September Apple will release iOS 9. It offers a new feature designed to enable the platform to take back some control over the mobile web experience. iOS 9’s Safari browser will offer adblocking capabilities. Many adtech firms and publishers have reacted to this extremely negatively as it means they suddenly find a large proportion of their mobile revenues at risk. Apple’s own adtech platform – iAD - will remain unaffected, as it serves the majority of its ads directly into apps.
However, iOS 9’s adblocking capability shouldn’t really be viewed as a problem in itself. Instead, it is symptomatic of a larger issue: the unnecessary complexity and clumsiness of the digital advertising industry. This is particularly relevant to mobile. Too often mobile advertising presents itself as an obstacle, foisting upon the user unwanted video, full screen takeovers, poorly targeted banners, and crudely reformatted desktop ads. On desktop this is irritating, but on mobile, with smaller screens and limited data, it’s inexcusable.
Beyond the clumsy ad formats mobile users are also subjected to a deluge of tracking tags, pixels and cookies used by a plethora of different companies busy learning all they can. A gloriously forthright recent article in The Verge by Nilay Patel lamented the current state of the mobile web, detailing the inadequacies of both the leading browsers - Chrome and Safari - as well as the side effect of publishers moving to native solutions and curated platforms such as Flipboard and Apple’s forthcoming News app. But these are just distractions – what is needed is a complete rethink.
Rebuilt browsers will help. It’s true that they’ve become clunky and outdated, but it’s the architecture of the mobile ad industry itself that really needs to be redesigned. We urgently need a centralised, standardised system for the collection and analysis of data. This would mean that a single tag should be able to deliver all the audience data any ad platform may need. Just one look at the notorious Lumascape slide illustrates the problem. Pretty much everyone on there will be running their own tracking - all too often unnecessarily duplicating existing data.
One answer could be a single, standardised data platform run independently of any one company and centrally regulated. The data collated could then be simply and easily shared via a subscription model. Or we could not bother and wait for Google and Apple to do it for us…
Ultimately, mobile advertising doesn’t really need to be this complicated. When we started Zapp360 we took a step back and tried to understand mobile better, with a view to building a platform designed for mobile advertising from the ground up.
We noted that mobile is and always has been defined by short bursts of information. From pagers back in the ‘90’s through to Twitter now, the platforms that work best on mobile keep it short. So we did the same. We then looked at how best to deliver those messages. By scrolling the text along the bottom of the screen, we’re able to reach audiences in an unobtrusive yet effective way. The bonus is that these messages can then be easily updated, and creative cost and implementation is kept to a bare minimum, making our admessages accessible to all kinds of businesses. All of this is powered by two very simple data points – location and time of day.
Ours is just one solution, and like the industry it will continue to evolve. It’s easy to get distracted by the bells and whistles offered by data and technology. At its heart, advertising has always been about delivering a message - it’s this that we need to remember.