via: MediaPost
Mobile Video Advertising: The Awkward Teen Years
Newly gold-plated by Google, mobile network AdMob got us all thinking about mobile video advertising this week. The company announced a video ad unit that is promising more interactive bells, whistles and gee-whizzes than the content it is made to underwrite. Which is fine, I guess, if you can find advertisers willing to craft creative to fill these unique attributes.
For the time being, mobile video advertising is at that strange teen stage where it is starting to look like a recognizable grown-up. Smart/App phone technologies and 3G speeds are making the experience truly viable. Content is pouring into Sprint TV and most of the TV-fueled apps. Only a year ago, advertisers were hard to spot in all that fallow inventory. Now, honestly, there is probably too much mobile video advertising in the random sampling I took the other day. Like a teen, mobile video looks almost adult, until it opens its mouth. Then you realize it still has a long way to go and lots to figure out.
The same malady that continues to plague the video Web, repurposed TV spots, is also commonplace on mobile. Actually I am not a knee-jerk enemy of repurposed TV ads. I think they can reinforce ads seen on other platforms and achieve something like a surround-sound effect. But the creative has to be really good, and it really works best when the digital ad iterates somehow on the TV experience.
Still, when it comes to reusing TV video, the results are sometimes worse on mobile than on the Web. Agencies should think two or three times before slapping their :15 spot in front of a clip. I saw one Smirnoff ad on AMC’s iPhone app, and even with the great iPhone screen, the scenes were far too dim and flat to render passably. I am pretty sure the ad involved a bunch of youths on their way into some ancient underground sewer system. I heard from the ads that “the acoustics were amazing” — but apparently no one thought to bring a light. Somebody please test this stuff!
And while I am whining, we need to frequency-cap ad serving. AMC and TMZ’s apps use the same Rhythm New Media network. I guess it s a good sign that the video engine here is selling so much of its inventory, but an ad on each and every clip? The content-to-ad ratio gets kicked into low single digits at some point. I understand that repurposing is a blight on Web video as well, but on mobile it gets excruciating. If a viewer is already familiar with the ad, then he knows precisely how long he will have to wait and wait to get to his content. My experience is that anything that already irritates us about the Web only gets amplified on mobile.
On the plus side, Rhythm still has the most adroit video player I have seen on mobile and this actually makes the video ads more palatable. Tap the “I” information button on the ad and you can go to a pop-up microsite but stay within the app. You can see the videos that are in queue so the engine always telegraphs what is coming next. Minimizing surprises is an often-overlooked mobile content value.
AdMob’s new video ad units are not technically the first interactive video ads on the platform, since I have been interacting with Rhythm New Media’s ads for a while. But AdMob is promising customizable action buttons and auto-play formats that can work as interstitials outside of the usual pre-roll contexts.
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