By 11/29/2012
For the upcoming Digiday Mobile conference on December 13th, Digiday asked speakers to pick a side in the great third screen debate: Is mobile media better suited for brand advertising or direct advertising, and why? Here’s how it breaks down.
Direct Response First
Currently, the majority of mobile ads are direct response, with the majority of direct response inventory residing in long tail applications like games. Direct response was the first to the mobile advertising party, and because direct response has a huge variety of available applications on mobile—like store locator, tap to call, tap to share, and tap to shop features among myriad others—it has proven to be largely successful for app or media downloads, local advertisers, and large brands looking for direct response engagement. It has also lead to some M&A and IPO exits with multiples that are rich against any benchmark.
A New Home for Brand Advertising
For big brands, image-making is the way to market share and decent margins, and there’s a massive quantity of image-making in traditional media looking for a better home. With the growing availability of premium mobile media (particularly premium mobile video), brand advertising is starting to find that home in mobile. With high video ad completion rates in premium media, driven by fair value exchange, brands can share their messages with users the way they used to in the days before ad skipping. The next big game is in mobile brand advertising.
Mobile’s Built for Both
Mobile might be the first medium ever with the ability to execute both direct response and brand advertising simultaneously and effectively. Traditional media and even online advertising peaked on one or the other, but not both. Advertising on smartphones and tablets can reach both consumers on the brink of purchase and those deeply invested in their content and receptive to brand messages. This is a huge deal.
The Power of Tightly Coordinated Campaigns
Using a combined approach, advertisers can show consumers the ideal brand and direct response ads in the right chosen sequence, frequency, and time windows. This can be wildly successful. At Rhythm, combining In-Stream mobile video (brand ads) with Full Page display (direct response) advertising gives advertisers a 15% increase in engagement over direct response alone with no brand support. And if you thought that was good, combining In-Stream mobile video with tablet banner ads lifts engagement by 41%.
Mobile media is best suited for direct response, for brand advertising, and for a hearty combination of the two. The proof is in the data.
