Small can be beautiful: Five tips to make good mobile ads

Is this a serious defence of mobile?
‘Life is full of micromoments’?
‘Make ads polite’?
‘Small is not always beautiful’?

It feels like a grab-bag of subjective, unfounded opinion.

How about some stats that showed it to be a highly effective medium?
Or some ads that were awarded or even interesting?

This has not moved the argument forward one iota….

Lisa, that article is fantastic. It seems really simple but so many people find it hard to get their heads around, thanks for taking the time and effort to write!

Loving the conversations about mobile creative, been a long time coming.. great points well made Lisa

Roll on ad-blocking technology.

@Paul Eveleigh

How do you think the websites with quality content are funded?

Assuming you’;re happy to pay a subscription fee for every site you want to visit?

@Lisa. Step in the right direction Lisa, we might not be near a perfect world for mobile creative just yet but as long as we are all making the right sounds. The above takes into account all stakeholders working together which has been a fundamental issue in production for digital for a very long time. Client/Media/Publisher/Creative…. lets solve that link 🙂

@Paul Eveleigh you do realise you are reading a website at no cost to yourself due to advertisers partly funding the business model and in other cases entirely funding it? A rather naive statement considering this is a site for people in the industry that should know better.

To those asking whether Paul Eveleigh doesn’t understand that ads pay for sites, I refer you to (journalist) Charles Arthur: (https://theoverspill.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/the-adblocking-revolution-is-months-away-with-ios-9-with-trouble-for-advertisers-publishers-and-google/)

“what about the moral dimension? The fact that if you block the ads, the sites lose their income?

I’ve previously written that the two sides on this are far apart; that adblocking is the new speeding: those who do it can justify why to themselves, while those who think it’s wrong are stern in their disapproval.

Entertainingly, when I noted on Twitter how many trackers I’d blocked using Ghostery (as part of an experiment using Ghostery, AdBlock, Javascript Blocker and uBlock to see how it changed my browsing experience), I was at once the object of finger-wagging and the accusation of the destruction of journalism:

@GeorgeBouras @charlesarthur And perhaps be done with quality media and journalism while you’re at it. Have you no responsibility to them?

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) July 26, 2015

Have I any responsibility to them? Well, not really. Certainly as a standard reader, here’s what happened: I accepted an invitation to read an article, but I don’t think that we quite got things straight at the top of the page over the extent to which I’d be tracked, and how multiple ad networks would profile me, and suck up my data allowance, and interfere with the reading experience. Don’t I get any say in the last two, at least?

Hence my response:

@jeffjarvis @GeorgeBouras I think it’s dangerous to think that readers must, or will, tolerate anything advertisers demand.

— Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) July 26, 2015

(You can view the entire conversation if you’re logged in to Twitter.)

Print evolved. Now it’s the web advertisers’ turn

This is the part of the debate that so interests (and, frankly, entertains) me. Print-based organisations were told they needed to evolve, and stop being such dinosaurs, because the web was where it was at: advertising was moving, and if they didn’t move too, they’d just die.

Now we’re all online, but somehow we’re meant to accept that web advertising is how it is, and never question or deviate from it? Nuh-uh. Why should web advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user habits? What’s sauce for the print goose is sauce for the online gander. I don’t recall the people who scolded me for using tracking detectors previously saying that everyone had to stick with print adverts because they made more money (which those ads still do).

Furthermore, any argument that tries to put a moral dam in front of a technological river is doomed. Napster; Bittorrent; now adblocking.

Lisa Bora, interesting article. Am looking forward to Nutri Gain, Telstra, Hyundai and NAB entries in the Mobile Marketing Association 2015 The Smarties Awards Australia New Zealand. http://www.mmaglobal.com/smarties

Ad blocking doesn’t work on native ads – the new frontier.

Dear @Team Native,
I assume you are referring to content blocking extensions for iOS9?
Just so you know its done based on content, hence why its called “Content Blocking” so Native Ads can be blocked, as well as Video Ads… as pretty much anything that you like.

Ad-blocking. The equivalent of content privacy. Ain’t karma a bitch.

@the new speeding

Agreed wholeheartedly. We have people on this thread defending their apparent right to push, what is often a irrelevant, intrusive, print advert into my digital world. It uses up my bandwidth, slows down and worsens my experience. Forget print! Print is print! Stop serving up tut in my feed.

Intent v awareness. Purpose. Less is more.

The issues for big agency’s is that many are squandering their clients marketing dollars. Yep, still the old school business model, which charges for creative. Pay for performance agencies become true partners; one future agency model perhaps?

@Alex and @ad-blocking. People pay for quality content. Print or online. Always have. Always will.
Who reads crap social media with purile ads?