Mobile

09
Sep
2015

Are Apple & Google Creating A Mobile Ad Network Duopoly?

Apple, loving ads on their Apple News app. Not so much on the open mobile web

With the annual Apple product launch event taking place this week, all anyone seems to be talking about are the new iPhones, iPads and Apple TV that will be thrown into the Autumn pipeline. But something else equally important to the state of the media landscape is also bubbling under the surface in the form of some interesting additions to the new iOS 9 software update.

Apple announced earlier this year that they are introducing an Ad-Blocker extension baked directly into iOS 9. This will allow iOS users to effectively opt-out of seeing ads on many third-party sites around the web. It has the potential to drastically impact online media publishers that make their money from hosting display ads on their site, and could put many of them in serious danger of going out of business.

Ad-blocking on mobile and the web is a hot topic at the moment, but regardless of the challenges that this poses to countless online publishers, when it comes to pushing ads on Apple’s own apps it’s a different story. They announced this week that ad-blocking will not be enabled on their new Apple News service, the app that aggregates content from a number of top publishers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Rolling Stone etc. While the revenue split looks favorable to the early adopter publishers, Apple News has the potential to grow into a huge hub for all major online publications very quickly. In this scenario, Apple own all the eyeballs, not only hijacking them from their original source, but also blocking the ads that appear to viewers that manage to slip through the net and get the content directly from the publisher’s site itself.

While blocking third-party ads on the open mobile web and promoting ads inside a particular mobile application (in this case, their own) is not exactly the same thing, the general attitude is the same: Hosting ads on your own site = Bad. Hosting ads on an Apple app = Good.

One rule for them. Another rule for the rest of us. They own the landscape I guess so everyone else just has to play by their rules.

Boromir Meme

Google champion In-App ads on Android but penalize mobile-web ads

Similarly, last week Google announced their new full-screen In-App advertisements. These ‘interstitials’ are full screen App-Install ads that will appear in Android apps to promote other apps to users. They look pretty nice and offer a much needed solution for advertisers that want to get exposure for their apps, but once again, there’s a potential conflict of interest.

Offering in-app advertising solutions on your own platform is fine, but when it comes to the mobile web, they want to crack down on publishers promoting their own apps on their own mobile sites. Google announced this week that they will start to penalize publishers in mobile search results that put up app-install banners (similar to the ones that Google just launched). A little contradictory no? Promote your apps through our in-app ad network, but don’t you dare try and do it on your own mobile site.

google-app-install

What next for publishers?

As the world goes increasing mobile, it’s not a question of distinguishing apps and the mobile web from the ‘real’ internet we all grew up with on the desktop, but about catering to the mobile experience first and foremost.

It’s time to invert that mental model – there is not the ‘mobile internet’ and the internet. Rather, if anything, it’s the internet and the ‘desktop internet’

Source: Benedict Evans

And this is where the problem is. In this mobile-first landscape, as Apple and Google exert more and more control over how ads are served on mobile devices, they’ll start to take a bigger and bigger slice of the pie. Both companies have been relatively happy to just facilitate the unprecedented growth of mobile usage over the last few years, but it looks like they are finally starting to really take advantage of the fact that they wrote the rule book. Duopoly much?

The rise in ad-blocking in general has been huge over the last 12 months and Apple & Google are throwing fuel on the fire all under the guise of ‘enhancing user experience’ on mobile. This is fine in theory, but pretty hypocritical when you champion your own ad platforms all while blocking out others. Publishers should think about this very carefully. In this new ad-blocking mobile age,  it might be a good time to stop and re-evaluate your strategy.

 

Posted by Rob in Apple, Google, Mobile, Old Media
25
Aug
2015

Video Ads on Google Search, News Media, Selfie Sticks, & Phone Calls

Google is testing promoted video ads on the Search Results Page

If you needed any more proof that video content is becoming increasingly important to promoting your brand online today then here you go. It seems that Google is beginning to test video ads directly in Search Results Pages, finally adding something new to the traditional ‘three lines of text and a link’ ads that we’re all used to. This opens up a whole new outlet for promoting your video content to a mass audience which, until now, has pretty much only been possible through YouTube and Facebook. This also calls for a different approach to video creation, catering to intent-based searches, such as for specific product information etc. Not to mention the potential of search hijacking your competitors — imagine Samsung sticking up video ads for the Galaxy S6 next to searches for the iPhone 6!

Either way, I think Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) design has long been in need of a revamp, and making it more visual and interactive will provide for a more pleasing experience for users.

Vice and CNN are in a battle royale for the future of the news

The news industry is in a state of flux at the moment. Even ignoring the decline of print and the growth in ad-blockers, with so many different news outlets available online today, users are spoilt for choice and the race for eyeballs is fierce. With the lines between digital and TV media publishers continuing to blur, Fast Company looks at how the gap between traditional news channels (like CNN) and digitally native outlets (such as Vice) has shrunk over the last couple of years. One interesting note to point out is the fact that Vice has an in-house agency called Virtue that produces “fresh content for brands—published on its site and anywhere else on the web—that still feels like stuff its viewers want to watch”.

The Decline of the Phone Call

Not so long ago, mobile phones used to be used primarily for one thing. Making phone calls. Not so anymore. This article discusses the different reasons that have sidelined the humble phonecall, mainly the fact that today’s mobile-savvy youth have grown up using SMS and Instant Messaging apps, but also less obvious reasons like the fact that making calls on a mobile has always been an unreliable experience when compared to how we used to make calls with the traditional landline (i.e. mobile calls have to deal with poor signal, background noise etc.) But this raises the concern that, as more and more people avoid telephone calls, are we risking the degradation of our verbal communication skills? Either way, you still can’t beat a quick phone when you need grab someone’s attention or get a response to something and don’t want to risk the likelihood of an email or text being ignored.

What Selfie Sticks Really Tell Us About Ourselves

It might not come as surprise, but according to research outlined in this New York Times profile, people who take a lot of selfies “tend to have narcissistic, psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits”. Selfie Sticks are one of the most annoying physical embodiments of our digital world. Even so, it’s interesting to hear of the different ways in which people’s behaviour re: online sharing has developed over recent years, and the role that selfies in particular have in many people’s sense of self in the digital world.

Posted by Rob in Google, Links of the Week, Mobile, Old Media
16
Aug
2015

The Post-Demographic Age, Chinese Millennials, Vine vs. SnapChat, & Vertical Videos

Post Demographic Consumerism: In a digital world, are ‘Generations’ redundant?

There’s somewhat of an obsession today around targeting the fabled ‘Millennial’, the general term given to the broad section of the population who have come of age since the digital revolution, who live on their smartphones and are totally immersed in the online world. It’s become clear however that Millennials are not so much a target group by themselves, but rather an almost infinite amount of smaller, individual groups based on a mountain of different tastes and preferences.

This piece from Advertising Age argues that the same is true for nearly every other target group that’s active today. We all now live in the digital age. Not just Millennials. And with the choices and options offered to basically all groups of the population today, trying to pigeon-hole people by age, gender, status or location, has become a fool’s game.

We live in a Post-Demographic Consumer age and sociologist Jane Pilcher Mannheim argues that what defines groups today is “less about their place in time and history, and more about finding their personal tribe — finding passions, people and brands that fit their vision of themselves… Quite possibly, a 16-year-old anime fan is more like a 32-year-old anime fan than she is similar to a 16-year-old sports enthusiast”. Food for thought.

However – some thoughts on appealing to ‘Chinese Millennials’ in particular

In contrast, one region where things are a little more straightforward when it comes to targeting by demographics is China, undoubtedly one of the biggest growth markets in the world right now. It’s not something I’ve ever thought much about before, but there are a few particular factors that go some way to forming the mindset of the young Chinese consumer.

Due to the massive economic growth in the country in the last couple of decades, coupled with the Chinese one-child per family policy, this has resulted in a certain type of generation. A generation that is much more self-obsessed, care-free, and more likely to seek out  short-term feel-good experiences than any generation preceding it. They don’t face the same type of hardship as their parents, and they are the sole focus of not only both parents, but both sets of grandparents as well. That is a hell of a lot of special attention. Interesting to see how some brands have adapted to appeal to these particular traits (read here).

Vine should not be ignored despite SnapChat stealing all the headlines

SnapChat has been the ‘it’ social network of the last 12-18 months, there’s no question about that. Evan Spiegel has been courting the ad world recently after a huge period of growth for the platform. While all this has been happening however, Vine has been racking up solid numbers of it’s own. Apparently Vine has the same amount of unique monthly visitors as SnapChat (34.5 million according to comScore) as well as playing 1.5 billion monthly “loops”.

It’s fallen under the radar somewhat since it burst onto the scene after being acquired by Twitter in 2013 and this article by Quartz suggests that one of the reasons why SnapChat has seen so much coverage is due to constant speculation over being acquired itself. Either way, these figures act as a reminder that Vine could still be a viable channel to use for brands (some decent examples in the article too) . Advertisers take note!

The rise of the vertical video

If SnapChat is responsible for one thing however, it has been the massive growth in popularity of the vertical video. Up until recently, shooting a video in portrait mode was one of the cardinal sins of video creation. The tides are changing however, and the fact that 30% of our total time looking at a screen of any kind is spent on a device held vertically is conditioning us to accept this form.  YouTube have revealed that uploads of tall videos have grown 50% in 2015. The growth of SnapChat and the recent roll-out of their ‘Discover’ section has meant that users are now more accustomed to seeing vertical videos from publishers and not just their friends. I’m betting that’s it’s not long before we start seeing vertical ads popping up in YouTube pre-rolls and the like.

Posted by Rob in Advertising, Links of the Week, Mobile, Snapchat
21
Jul
2015

Social & Search ‘Buy’ buttons, and what SMEs can learn about Mobile Commerce

Despite the fact that most of us have been addicted to our smartphones for the last five or six years, not many companies have truly perfected the art of getting consumers to actually buy things on their mobile device. Few have truly cracked the concept of Mobile Commerce. Most of us shop online at least some of the time, but while we tend to search a lot on our mobiles, when it comes time to actually opening our virtual wallets and parting with our cash, consumers have shown time and time again a preference for taking to a desktop to complete the purchase.

This could be because it’s a pain in the ass filling out payment information on a small screen, or it could be due to a psychological pre-disposition from a consumer behavior point of view. Either way, online retailers haven’t been helping themselves by generally having pretty crappy e-commerce set-ups on their site. Things are improving all the time though, and in the last year alone we have seen many of the biggest players in the space starting to lead the way in encouraging, and facilitating, mobile shopping.

google purchases

Just last week Google announced a new feature called ‘Purchases’ which adds a BUY button to mobile search ads so that users are prompted to make a purchase there and then. This takes you to a product page hosted by Google where you can find out more information about the product and complete the purchase using your stored payment information while the order fulfillment is carried out by the merchant as per usual.

Facebook and Twitter have also been using similar BUY buttons in their product ads on mobile over the last year, with both Instagram and Pinterest following suit over the last couple of months too. It’s clear that this is quickly becoming a standard feature across most of the big tech platforms’ advertising offerings but of course this means that to take advantage of these features, you have to be running ads with Google AdWords, Facebook etc. in the first place. It is essentially just another way to increase the direct impact of an ad to encourage impulse purchases.

The main aim of these features is to reduce the friction of making a purchase on a mobile device when engaging with Search and Social, but I think there is a more important lesson to take for smaller companies with regards to their own online sales experience. It’s all well and good optimizing an ad on a digital platform for selling on a smartphone, but if the buying process on your own mobile website isn’t up to the same standard, than you are putting your company at a disadvantage. Many brands today put a lot of effort into digital and social media marketing, and that’s great, but it’s not much use if you lose the sale at the final hurdle by having a terrible mobile e-Commerce process.

Don’t rely on the big tech companies to convert your sales for you. Invest in a decent mobile e-Commerce experience.

Posted by Rob in e-Commerce, Mobile
27
Apr
2015

Why Google Says You Need A Mobile Responsive Website

#Mobilegeddon day has come and past. And, while the world is still spinning and things might seem like normal outside, in the realm of the world wide web and mobile search, things are very much different.

The reason? The world’s largest search engine has made a major update to its mobile search algorithm that will change the order in which websites are ranked when users carry out a search on their phone or tablet.

Google may have been talking about this for what seems like forever, but they have finally made good on their promise, and begun to favour mobile responsive websites for when searches are made on a mobile device. Yes, your Google results will now change, favouring those sites that are optimized for mobile experiences.

The change will favour websites with large text, easy-to-click links, and displays that resize to fit whatever screen they’re viewed on, ranking these sites higher in the search results. This essentially deprioritizes millions of sites around the world that have yet to optimize for mobile.

mobilegeddon

This makes sense because, as more and more people carry out searches on mobile devices, Google wants to give them the best experience they possibly can. No-one likes pinching the screen to zoom in and squinting to find the information they want from a site on their mobile. For both Google and the end-user this is a win-win scenario.

But for businesses, things are different. It means that if one of your prospective customers searches for a product that your company provides, and your competitors have a mobile-ready website but you don’t, you are immediately at a disadvantage.

So what can you do to make sure that your company is not negatively affected? Well for a start, you need to make your website mobile responsive. In 2015, this is a necessity if you want to succeed online. This won’t only benefit your business by making sure that Google gives you priority in mobile search, but it will also give customers who access your site on their smartphone or tablet a much better experience. Over 70% of people in the UAE search for information via their mobile devices. Is your site ready?

Posted by Rob in Google, Mobile