Leveraging buyers, publishers, and networks
Understanding how to buy mobile advertising
Discovering how to monetize your sites with advertising
Placing mobile ads in front of mobile users
With the proliferation of mobile devices and the increased consumer adoption of services like SMS, mobile Internet and applications marketers like you are turning to mobile advertising, and like them, you can
Generate brand awareness. Increase the number of people who know about your company and its products and services.
Increase the likelihood that consumers may want to buy your products.
Increase sales by driving traffic directly to a transaction.
Generate new revenue streams by including advertising in your messaging, mobile Internetsites, and applications.
If you've never bought an advertisement in your life, or even if you're not sure how you can employ mobileadvertising, don't worry. You've come to the right place. In this chapter, we teach you all about mobile advertising: what it is, who to work with, and how to buy and sell it.
Mobile advertising is the practice of a mobile advertiser (also referred to as a buyer) placing paid-for promotional messaging and sponsorship messages within a publisher's mobile media property as supported by a mobile advertising network or search provider (see Figure 10-1). For example:
Text messages, multimedia messages, and e-mail messages
Mobile Internet sites, both your own and others
Mobile applications that people download through application stores
Mobile audio and video content that plays on a mobile device
Mobile advertising is a lot like online advertising, but with three key advantages over traditional onlineadvertising. You should become familiar with each advantage so you can include them in your marketing plans:
Reach: Reach is defined as the number of unique individuals seeing an ad at least one time during a specific period. In order to get the best results for the least amount of money, you want your ad exposed to as many people (in other words, to have as broad a reach) as possible.
Mobile has the potential of greater reach than any other medium because the majority of the population is carrying a mobile device and increasingly using mobile media like SMS, mobile Internet, and applications. Research firms like Insight Express (
www.insightexpress.com) also point out that mobile generates better brand awareness andoverall purchase intent than online media advertising. You can find out more about increasing your reach in the next section.Relevancy: Relevancy refers to an ad or advertised product being pertinent to the target audience. If your product or message within your ad campaign is not targeted to a relevant audience, the ad campaign will be ineffective. Increasingly, ad networks areable to adjust the content and type of an ad to take many factors into account, such as the consumers' physical locations, types of phones, their direction of travel (and speed), their stated preferences and interests, theirdemographic profiles, and past and current behaviors (like what they own or are reading). By taking all this informationinto account in real time, advertisers are able to ensure that your ad is placed in front of people who are interested in what you have to offer.
Immediacy: Mobile offers the best "in the moment" engagement. Given the personal nature, the uncluttered space (most pages have only one or two ads), and the, well, mobile nature of the mobile medium, when they're presented with a relevant ad, mobile users are often inclined to respond immediately. Unlike other forms of advertising, mobile advertising can reach users while they areinteracting with a brand or product. For example, an ad for laundry detergent is much more relevant to someone standing in thegrocery store than someone sitting at work in front of a computer.
Mobile advertising can take a variety of forms. You should be aware of each so you can know your options and think about advertising across multiple channels and formats, which broadens your reach.
Given the rich diversity of mobile media and devices, mobile advertising has a lot of potential. The following sections help you become acquainted with the different types of mobile advertising and their advantages.
The first thing to consider when building a mobile advertising strategy is the type of advertising you want to do. The type of advertising you want to do is known as an ad unit. Because each type of mobile advertising space and device supports a different type of advertising, you need to format your advertising using the ad units that make the most sense for each opportunity. Here are the most common types of ad units:
Text: Text ads consist of alphanumeric text, including mobile Internet URLs and phone numbers.
Banner ads: Banner ads refer to both static and animated images displayed on mobile Internet pages, in applications, in video, and in animated content (see Figure 10-2).
Audio ads: Audio ads refer to advertisements inserted into audio content, music and radio, directory services, and event text-to-speech services. (For example, when a service reads a mobile Web page to you, advertisements may be interlaced into the content.)
Rich media ads: Rich media ads take banner advertising to the next level and are supported on onlythe latest smartphones and mobile devices. A rich media ad unit may include text, images, video, animation, and audio that may expand to full-screen, float on the screen, or perform any number of other interactive and visualgymnastics. In addition, rich media ad units may leverage the advanced capabilities of the latest mobile devices, like location detection, interaction through the touchscreen, or unique motions of the device (like shaking it).
Almost any mobile advertisement may appear at different places with mobile media, including
Pre- or post-appended to a text message, MMS message, or mobile Internet site: That is at the beginning or end of the message or site.
In-line: The add is placed in-line within a message, a page, or application.
Pre- or post-roll: In this case, the ad is placed at the start and or end of a video or audio clip.
Interstitial (or bumper ad unit): The ad is displayed when pages are loading or when applications are downloading.
Idle screen: The ad is displayed on the home screen of the device when it sits idle for a period of time, maybe a few seconds or minutes.
Tip
Each type of ad unit and placement decision is valuable in and of itself, but advertising is most effective when a variety of messages get in front of the same consumer. Make sure you are familiar with all the aforementioned advertisement types and placements before you come up with your strategy. Consider including three or more ad units and placements in any given advertising campaign.
Everyone who browses the Web uses search engines to find Web sites, and advertisers place ads on search engines like Google or Yahoo! in order to attract clicks from the people who are searching for things. Mobile search is a practice similar to Internet search, but with mobile search, people use their mobile phones to conduct the searches.
Most people who engage in mobile search still go to the most familiar search engines, but you should be aware of some key differences in the way that mobile search advertisements work so you can alter any of your search engine advertisements that are targeted at mobile searchers. (If you want to learn the basics of placing search engine ads in general, we suggest you read Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing For Dummies by Peter Kent, published by Wiley.) Here are the key factors to remember about mobile search:
Mobile searches are usually optimized for location. Search providers like Google, Yahoo!, oneSearch, and Microsoft with its Bing service have optimized their search programs to takeinto account a user's location. Local search providers can be very effective as well, such as Yelp (
www.yelp.com), Jingle Networks (www.jinglenetworks.com), City Search (www.citysearch.com), Where (www.where.com), and others. For example, if you're in San Jose, California, and you're using your mobile to look for a pizza place, Google starts by showing you the results for pizza places near where you are standing, as shown in Figure 10-3. If you're targeting mobile searchers, make sure your advertisements take the searchers' locations into account.Mobile users have access to mobile question and answer services. These services allow users to post questions to the service. Automated or live agents (meaning real people) answer the questions. Some of the leading providers of this service include Snackable Media (
www.snackablemedia.com), ChaCha (www.chacha.com), AskMeNow (www.Askmenow.com), and MobileBits (www.mobilebits.com). These services don't own the whole search market, but it's a good idea to be on one or more of them so your business can be the answer to someone's question about your products or services.Mobile directories are more friendly than Web directories. Mobile directory search, like the local yellow pages, help people find local services nearby. Mobile directories sell listings and are optimized for smaller screens. When listing on a mobile search directory, make sure your listing points to a mobile Web site. (Read Chapter 8 for more information about mobile Web sites.)
Note
Working with mobile search providers to place search engine advertising is pretty easy. For most solutions, you don't have to do anything technically different from your Web-based search advertising to get your search engine advertisements to appear on mobile screens.
Tip
In addition to placing paid search advertisements, you want to make sure your mobile Web sites are optimized for search engines so your site appears in organic search results. To improve your mobile search engine ranking, check out Chapter 8.
Mobile advertising involves two primary players — the buyer and the publisher — either or both of which may be your company or another company, depending on the situation. Here's how it works:
The company that pays to place a marketing message in an available mobile space is called the mobile ad buyer. For example, you're the ad buyer when you buy an ad on someone else's mobile Web site. Another company is the ad buyer when it buys an ad on your behalf.
The company that provides the space for an ad and takes the money from the buyer is called the ad publisher. For example, you're the ad publisher when you sell ad space on your own mobile Web site to an ad buyer, and another company is the ad publisher when you buy advertising space from it.
Tip
Buying and publishing mobile advertising requires a combination of technology, connections, and expertise. If you have all three, you might be able to buy and publish your own mobile advertisements. Chances are, however, that you'll need at least one of the companies described in the following sections to be successful with all your mobile advertising.
If buying mobile advertising is not within your area of expertise, you may choose to work with an outside ad buyer (also called a media agency). Media agencies are ad buyers that negotiate and purchase mobile advertising space or inventory on your behalf. Buyers work with you to plan and spend advertising budgets so you can maximize the return on investment for a given ad campaign.
Here are some scenarios where you might want to consider using a professional mobile media buyer:
You want to advertise on premium sites, such as MTV, CNN, ESPN, the Weather Channel, Disney, and others. These organizations tend to sell their own ad inventory, or work with a specialty group. Moreover, they often want to work through a media buyer, meaning they don't want towork with you (the buyer) directly, unless your budgets are fairly large and your needs are unique.
You have a large budget. When you have a large budget, the buyer can help you draw up a strategy to ensure that your advertisements are spread across all the appropriate mobile media, with the right reach and frequency (the number of times an ad is displayed in a given period). A lot of work goes into this, and you definitely ought to leverage the buyer's expertise.
You need to place ads across several mobile mediums. If you want to advertise across mobile mediums, such as SMS, MMS, mobile Internet, applications, and so on, realize that a lot of work goes into understanding how to buy the media as well as deliver it. You shouldn't try to become an expert in all of them — let the buyer do that. If you're buying in only one medium, however, you can go directly to companies like 4INFO (
www.4info.com) for text messaging advertising or AdMob, recently acquired by Google (www.admob.com), for display advertising.You need several inventory sources. Inventory refers to all the possible locations where your advertisement may be placed in all the different forms of mobile media. Even the biggest media properties such as CNN or ESPN may not be able to get you the reachand the exposure you're looking to achieve with your advertising. You may need to go to many media companies anduse many mobile mediums to get the reach you're looking for. A buyer can help you with this.
You want a discount. An ad buyer can negotiate discounted rates due to prior relationships and bulk rates. He also knows the best sources of inventory. He saves you time and money and delivers better results by managing the different allocations of spending across inventory sources where the ROI (return on investment) is highest.
You're short on time. You should use an ad buyer when you can't dedicate resources to real-time campaignmanagement, monetization, and the negotiations for getting the best price for your advertising buys.
You need an expert. For big-spending clients new to the advertising space, buyers can provide more expert industry knowledge and resources to invest in the most relevant products and targeting methods.
Tip
Resources such as Advertising Age (http://adage.com/datacenter/) can provide lists of the most popular ad buying agencies. The choice of which to use is a personal one and can depend on your product, the size of the ad, and the resources that agency can dedicate to an ad campaign. There is really no easy way to figure out which one is best for you. You simply need to call a few candidates to see whether they know anything about your market and whether their pricing is competitive. If they've been in the industry a long time, you probably can trust that they can do a good job, but be sure to look at smaller firms that may be hungry for your business or have a unique specialty in serving your market. Sometimes the larger firms won't really understand the nuances of your business, in which case a smaller firm may do a better job for you.
Note
Because every ad needs a space in order to be seen by consumers and because advertising generally works better when it's placed in lots of spaces, every ad buyer needs to buy space from multiple publishers. If you're working through a formal ad buyer or agency, however, you won't have to interact with mobilepublishers directly. The agency will work on your behalf to purchase relevant inventory on placements to obtain the highest ROI.
Tip
Another advantage of using media agencies to buy ads for you is that they can also work with multiple publishers to provide data that shows how your ads are performing on their sites in aggregate. Read more about tracking mobile advertising performance in Chapter 14.
Mobile advertising networks aggregate supply and demand for advertisers and publishers by buying inventory from multiple publishers and by providing different types of ad units (see Figure 10-4 for an example). That way, buyers and agencies can reach groups of people who use different mobile sites without needing to work with a different publisher for each site. For example, if an advertiser would like totarget females ages 25-54, the ad network can target multiple sites that attract a large number of women within this age range. Women from the category who use different Web sites see the same ads, and the women from the category who use multiple Web sites see the ads multiple times.
Additionally, mobile advertising networks allow an advertiser to target multiple audiences with one or more specific characteristics that span the entire audience. For example, you may want to advertise to people who live in Boston, love sports, and own iPhones. Your advertising network can place your ads on mobile sports sites and display the ads only to people in Boston using an iPhone. Networks can also allow you to target by behavior, so someone who loves the Yankees won't see your ads when they visit a sports site while they happen to be visiting Boston.
If you decide to work with an advertising network, some of these organizations have HTML script (software code) that they'll give to you to paste it into your site. AdMob, shown in Figure 10-5, is one suchnetwork.
After the code is in your site, everyone who visits your mobile Web page (or application) sees the ads that your advertising network pulls based on relevancy to the page or application being viewed.
One of the leading advertising networks for do-it-yourself mobile advertising is AdMob (AdMob was recentlyacquired by Google). AdMob is a major mobile advertising service provider. What follows is an example of how to work through its process to create a mobile ad. Other vendors are available, so make sure to do your research tofind out which one is best for your needs.
To work with AdMob, refer to the following steps (most of the other firms have a similar tool):
Go to
www.admob.comand click the Not Registered? Sign Up Now link.Complete the registration form and select the Submit button.
To fill out the form, you have to supply an e-mail address, password, your first and last name, address, country, city, state, and ZIP code, and you also need to read and confirm the terms and conditions.
After you click Submit, wait to receive the registration confirmation e-mail. Your account is not active until you've confirmed your e-mail address by clicking the confirmation link in the e-mail from AdMob.
After you've activated your account, return to the AdMob site and log in.
You may be asked to verify or update your account information and specify the type of account you want. For example, are you an advertiser, publisher, or both?
After you've created your account, you need to create your first ad. Because you're looking to create an advertisement, click the Marketplace link on the top of the page, click the Campaign tab, and then click the Create New Campaign button. Follow the four steps below to create and launch your ad:
Complete the campaign details form.
You need to set a start date and optional end date, and specify your daily budget, for example, $50. The daily budget reflects how much money you're willing to spend each day to have your ad served to a publisher's site. If you set the CPM (cost per thousand) bid rate for your ad at $1 (how much you're willing to pay a publisherto serve your ad), your ad will be displayed 50 times a day ($1 × 50 = $50). You also need to specify the delivery method you want: Standard, which spaces ads out evenly throughout the day, or Accelerated, which shows them as fast as the publishers will take them.
Next, specify where you want your ads to go: mobile Web sites, applications, media(like iTunes), or local business search channels.
Set the targeting parameters for your ad: what type of devices do you want it served to, what geographies (countries, regions, states, cities), what networks(carriers, Wi-Fi), and specific consumer demographics (gender and age groups). Finally, you need to set your bid rate.
In the final step, specify the type of ad you're running — a text ad or a banner ad. If you select text, you must enter the text and promotional link for thead. If you select banner, you have to upload the banner image (file size must be 75K or less) and link.
As soon as you complete the form, your ad is ready to go and will be published on the start date. You'll be advertising your products and services!
AdMob is not the only mobile advertising network provider with a self-administration tool for advertising management. Millennial Media has a very powerful and easy to use solution, too;see Figure 10-6.
If you choose not to buy through a formal publisher or advertising network, you need to reach out directly to the sales staff that sells the space for the publisher in order to buy space for your mobile advertising. You can get a list of top mobile ad sites by looking at Nielsen (www.nielsen.com) — a top data collectionand research firm with specific outlets for mobile data. Visit its Web site to find out how to license its data.
Note
Some publishers can also be aggregators that work with several inventory sources at once. These aggregate publishers can help you to simplify what would otherwise be a very complex process of ad placements because mobile handsets, carriers, and diversity in the types of ad space tend to require many different creative and technical capabilities. Strong mobile publishers also have best practices to ensure creative compatibility.
Tip
When you go directly to a publisher to make ad placements, ask your publisher for advice so you can decide how much to spend. Mobile publishers should be able to evaluate the best placement for ads. They do this based on their audience and traffic and by choosing when and how often to show ads in order to optimize the user experience on the site and maximize interactions with ads. If your mobile publisher can't show you lots of useful data, don't buy space from it!
Mobile carriers such as Verizon, AT & T, Sprint, and T-Mobile, offer advertising space on their proprietary mobile sites, also known as on-deck inventory. Carrier sites are a good choice when your goal is to reach only the customers using a specific carrier, but keep in mind that you'll need to also consider other characteristics of the people who use that carrier. For example, advertising the availability of an iPhone app to Verizon customers won't work because Verizon doesn't currently carry the iPhone.
Warning
Understanding all the carrier's devices, users, geographic coverage, and data plans can become cumbersome, especially when you're trying to run a single ad campaign on more than one carrier's inventory. Unless you really need to reach the customers of a specific carrier, choose a mobile advertising network instead.
Mobile advertising is purchased on terms that are based on the level of interaction with the ad — just like online advertising. The terms can dictate the cost of each ad displayed or the cost of various actions taken in response to an ad. Here are the most common payment terms for mobile advertising followed by some advice for choosing the right method:
Cost-per-thousand(CPM): CPM means that you pay a fee based on the cost of one thousand impressions (every time the ad appears in front of someone). For example, a CPM of $5 means that you pay $5for every 1,000 times your ad appears. Keep in mind that CPM does not require anyone to click on the ad or even to look at the ad. It just means it was displayed when someone visited the page where the ad is placed. That's why CPM is usually used as a way to compare impressions to clicks or other actions rather than a way to bill you for advertisements.
Cost-per-click(CPC): CPC means that you pay a fee every time someoneclicks on an ad (or, in the case of mobile, every time someone touches the ad with her finger). For example, a CPC of $5 means that you'll pay $5 every time someone touches one of your ads. Use this method when your main concern is driving traffic to a mobile Web site and you are trying to convert visitors to customers.
Cost-per-action(CPA): CPA means that you pay a fee every time someone completes a specific action as a result of touching an ad, such as visiting a Web site, filling out a form, or sending a text message with a secret code word found in the ad. Use this method when your agency or another partner is responsible for driving traffic to a mobile Web site and converting visitors to customers for you.
Sponsorship: Sponsorship means that buyers can also simply pay a publisher a lump sum and sponsor the inventory in a media property for a fixed period of time. Forexample, you may sponsor the development of an application and pay a little extra to have your logo on the launch screen (the screen that appears when the app is loading) for a number of months.
Tip
You can't have a meaningful discussion about paying your mobile buyer, publisher, or network until you know what actions you want to pay for. Make sure everyone involved understands your goals so you can build a payment strategy that charges you no sooner than the moment you get value in return.
If you want to get a return on the money you spend buying mobile advertising, you want to make sure to pay attention to the purpose of your advertising in relation to the costs of your advertising. If you spend too much, it's probably not because you paid too much, but rather because
The next sections explain how to target your ads and set them up to invite actions that lead to sales.
Before placing any mobile advertisements, you should make sure your ads are going to reach the right people — the people who are most likely to buy from you! Here are three questions you need to answer before you talk to an agency, make any placement decisions, or spend any money:
Am I trying to reach everyone or a specific group? If you're targeting a specific group of people, you'll need to know which Web sites, applications, and phones they use. Publishers can give you this information. Make sure you ask for it before placing any ads.
How do I want people to engage with my ad? If you just want people to see your ads, you have more choices than if you need people to be able to click through and complete a purchase or share the ad on through social media. You should choose actions that move your audience closer to completing one of your goals. We discuss actions in more detail in the section called, "Inviting action on your mobile ads" later in this chapter.
How will I know that my ads achieved my goals? Decide from the onsethow you'll measure success and how you'll track and quantify your results. Your publisher or network can give you a variety of data points that demonstrate your advertising performance. Many of the ad networks allow you tocreate predictive models so you can make your initial placement decisions and make changes afterward if you aren't getting the results you want. You can read more about ad tracking in Chapter 14.
Tip
After you have answered these questions, you should have a good idea of your target audience and target goals. The next step is to share these targets and goals with your publisher or agency or apply the goals to your network by including them in your ad parameters. Then you can begin creating your ads.
When creating ads for mobile properties, like mobile Web sites and applications, you need to make sure your ads are sized and formatted correctly. If you're working with an agency or network, they usually have creative services to help you. If you're buying directly from a publisher, you need to do the creative work yourself in some cases. Even if you're outsourcing your creative work on some level, you need to keep the following in mind so you can get the results you need:
Size: There are many standards sizes for different screens. The typical standards include X-Large Image Banner (300 × 50 pixels), Large Image Banner (216 × 36pixels), Medium Image Banner (168 × 28 pixels), Small Image Banner (120 × 30pixels), and Text Tagline (text of about 10-24 characters). Make sure you create banners of all sizes so that your advertising network can send the appropriate size for the consumer's phone.
Format: The format of the ad depends on the type of phone the ad is being served to and the network it's going over. It's best to work with an expert when decidingon a format because there are so many variations. For example, iPhones don't support Flash (Adobe's multimedia platform used to add video, animation and interactivity to Web pages) and most phones don't support JavaScript or other rich media.
Analytics: Make sure you've integrated a mobile analytics package such as Google Analytics(
www.google.com/analytics), Omniture (www.omniture.com), AdMob (www.admob.com), or Bango (www.bango.com) to track the traffic on your properties and the success of your programs. The datafrom these tools helps you optimize your strategy. See Chapter 14 for a more detailed review of mobile analytics.
Whether you use publishers, agencies, or networks to place your mobile ads, you need to decide what you want people to do, if anything, when they see your ads. Making your ads clickable or touchable is not enough. If you want people to take action on your ads, your ads need to suggest or invite those actions, and then those actions need to meet two criteria:
Your actions must be mobile-friendly. For example, if your mobile ad asks someone to touch or click the ad in order to visit your Web site, your Web site had better work properly on the mobile phone that person used to touch or click the ad(see Table 10-1).
Your actions must help you reach your goals. For example, if your mobile ad asks someone to watch a video, that video had better include enough information and incentives to invite a purchase if you're trying to use the video to help sell a product.
Table 10-1. Mobile Marketing Association Mobile Web Ad Guidelines
Technical Specifications | Sample Creative | |
|---|---|---|
X-Large Image Banner | 300x75 pixels Universal unit: GIF, PNG, JPEG for still image Less than 5K file size Supplemental unit: Animated GIF for animation Less than 7.5K file size |  |
Large Image Banner | 216x54 pixels Universal unit: GIF, PNG, and JPEG for still image Less than 3K file size Supplemental unit: Animated GIF for animation Less than 4.5K file size |  |
Medium Image Banner | 168x42 pixels Universal unit: GIF, PNG, and JPEG for still image Less than 2K file size Supplemental unit: Animated GIF for animation Less than 3K file size |  |
Small Image Banner | 120x30 pixels Universal unit: GIF, PNG, and JPEG for stillimage Less than 1K file size Supplemental unit: Animated GIF for animation Less than 1.5K file size |  |
Text Tagline | Up to 24 characters for X-LargeUp to 18 characters for Large Up to 12 characters for Medium Up to 10 characters for Small |  |
Mobile audio advertising
We often forget that the mobile phone is just that, a phone, and that voice calls can be made with it. Moreover, with the proliferation of smartphones, more and more users are streaming audio over the data channel (the Internet) over their phones. Recently, a number of companies have emerged to make it possible to serve advertising into these audio channels. Here are a few examples:
Click-to-call audio advertising: Buyers promote phone numbers in text messages, mobile Web sites, and applications, as shown in the following figure. When the ad is clicked, the phone dials out and the ad plays. The leading provider of this form of advertising is UpSnap (
www.upsnap.com/).Directory services: Jingle Networks (
www.jinglenetworks) deploys a robust advertising-supported directory service. Consumers may receive free directory services and forgo the carrier charges by calling 1-800-Free411. To receive the free directory services, all they need to do is to listen to a few ads. This is a great place for buyers to research.Internet radio: As radio and related audio services go mobile, leading firms like TargetSpot (
www.targetspot.com) are making it possible to buy advertising within mobile radio broadcasts.
Note
Mobile is a location-aware media. That means your ads can invite locationbased actions without requiring a click or touch, such as asking someone to walk into a store and show the ad to the person behind the counter.
Here are some ways you can invite action from people using your mobile ads as the starting point, and some tips to make sure those actions are friendly to mobile users. (Mobile advertisers call these post-click actions.)
Ask them to submit a form: Use a mobile form to enlarge your mailing lists, take orders, or collect survey information. Mobile forms shouldn't be too long because screens and keyboards are small. The simpler, the better.
Invite click-to-call: Click-to-call can happen two ways — directly from an ad, or redirecting to a landing page that customers opt to dial. For an immediate response, click-to-call from the ad is the way to go because it immediately asks a user to touch and automatically dial the phone number. For a secondary opt-in to ensure the user really wants to connect with someone live about the product, redirect the user to the landing page and give him the choice to dial there. This essentially acts like a double opt-in, which could lead to better caller quality, but could lead to drop-off (users getting impatient and moving away from the process before they make the call). In either case, make sure your ad copy asks the caller to mention the ad so you can track the number of calls resulting from your ads.
Display a coupon: Use mobile ads as coupons to capture comparison shoppers on-the-go or to enable a discounted purchase on a mobile Web site.
Promote a store locator or map: Mobile ads can be set up to utilize GPS so you can direct shoppers to specific locations such as product displays or VIP parking lots.
Offer an application download: If you've built an application, mobile ads are a great way to drive people to install the application on their phones.
Show a video: Only certain phones are capable of displaying video on the handset. Typically publishers and ad networks are able to tell clients which handsets are mobile-capable. The video must be formatted to fit mobile specifications. The videos can be created by an in-house mobile creative staff, or can be outsourced to mobile creative agencies or ad networks with a creative department. Users have the option to interact with the ad campaign through streaming video either through the ad unit or as a call to action on your mobile site or landing page. (The action could be to watch a movie preview, demo a product, watch an interview, and so on.) If a client doesn'ft have a video specifically built on his home page, a link to a YouTube video works as well, but is limited in the devices it can play on — at this time, mostly only advanced devices (such as iPhones, BlackBerrys, and so on).
Make mobile commerce: Allowing an immediate purchase as part of your call to action requires the consumer to provide credit card or payment information. To enable this action, you need a mobile application or a secure mobile site. You can read more about enabling mobile commerce in Chapter 13.
Go social: Direct people to your social media site to become fans or ask people to share your mobile ad with friends. You can read more about mobile social media in Chapter 12.
Note
Of course, if you just want people to see and remember your ads, that's okay too. Lots of companies use mobile advertising to increase recall or loyalty and that doesn't necessarily require a click or touch. Just make sure you are measuring recall and loyalty by taking surveys or doing research before and after you run your advertising campaigns. You can read more about tracking mobile advertising in Chapter 14.
If you want to be an ad publisher and sell your own space to other ad buyers, or if you want to advertise your own products or services in the mobile properties you already own, you can use the available space in your mobile properties to place advertising as a publisher. For example, you could place advertisements in
Your own mobile Web site
Text messages and multimedia messages you send out
Mobile applications and downloadable content you own
Placing ads on your own mobile properties allows you to make money on those properties or pay for the costs to create them. Either way, mobile advertising is a great way to make money. The following sections show you how to publish ads in the aforementioned three mobile properties.
If you're placing your own ads on your own site or if you have a simple mobile Web site and only a few advertisers buying space from you, you can simply cut and paste the ads you create into the appropriate space on your mobile site. If you really want to make money selling mobile ads, use an advertising network so you can sell your inventory to multiple buyers and allow them to bid for the price of your space.
If you want to publish with a network, you need to verify that your mobile marketing Web site application is integrated with one or more mobile advertising networks. If it's not, have a member of your technical team or your mobile applications provider contact a mobile advertising network aggregator to ask what it will take to integrate your application(s) with the ad network. After you have verified network integration, you can use either of two methods to include advertising network ads in your mobile Web Internet sites and pages:
Use a mobile Internet visual editor. Mobile Internet visual editors make placing ads on your mobile Internet site a snap. These editors are integrated with the leading mobile advertising networks. You simply need to get your account credentials (such as user name and password) from the mobile advertising aggregator, paste this information into the editor, and click Save to insert an ad placeholder into your site. When a mobile subscriber visits your site, the mobile marketing application reaches out to the aggregator's system, requests an ad, places the ad on the site, and displays it to the mobile subscriber — all in a matter of seconds. See Figure 10-7 for an example of a mobile Internet site visual editor, like iLoop Mobile (
www.iloopmobile.com), Mad Mobile (www.madmobile.com), Mobile Card Cast (www.mobilecardcast.com), and others.Paste ad network code into your pages. If you're not using a visual editor and are simply working in code, getting an ad onto your mobile Internet site may take a few more steps, but is definitely doable; see the section titled, "Working with mobile advertising networks" earlier in this chapter.
Text advertisements can be inserted into Short Message Service (SMS) messages to advertise products, services, or special offers. The ads are usually placed at the end of standard SMS messages as links or ads can stand as text alone. SMS ads are not display ads because they are made up of text only. SMS ads can be linked to display ads, however, as shown in Figure 10-8.
MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) advertising can be formatted with images, text, audio, and video, which makes them great for delivering richer ads, as shown in Figure 10-9.
Tip
Format is important here to allow for the greatest number of viewers. Service providers can compress content like videos in your MMS advertising and use their unique applications to make your content work across more carriers and handsets.
Note
In most cases, MMS and SMS ads need to be sent through an MMS or SMS service as opposed to an advertising network because it's impossible to dynamically insert advertising into MMS and SMS messages through code insertion. To find out how to create an MMS message to send advertisements, read Chapter 6. You can discover how to create SMS messages in Chapter 5.
Note
Not all carriers support MMS messages. Using them may reduce the number of people you are able to reach if rich content is the only communication you offer.
In-application or in-app refers to advertisements placed in free or paid applications installed on a mobile device. Ads can be sold within applications to make money or to help offset the cost of building and maintaining the applications. Ads can also be placed by the application owner to increase the brand recall or confidence of the people who use the applications. Ads can also be placed in downloadable content, such as videos, ringtones, or podcasts to achieve the same goals as in-app advertising.
Placing ads in mobile applications and downloads requires forethought because you need to include the ability to display advertising when you're building the applications or downloads. Talk to your programmers or application providers about including dynamic ad network servers or static display ads and make sure your agency is aware of your goals and target audience. To find out more about building applications, read Chapter 9.