In brief
Native app advertising can make mobile ads more appealing by integrating useful or entertaining content into the user experience. The article argues that collaboration among advertisers, agencies and media platforms can build brand goodwill and encourage voluntary clicks and sharing.
When it comes to advertising, consumers generally react negatively. Ordinary consumers cannot avoid advertisements broadcast through public media, but they can block mobile ads with apps such as Ad Block. Advertising on mobile phones therefore requires real strategy. In the early days of advertising on WeChat Moments, people readily interacted with ads because they knew this would make them visible to their friends. After several bursts of activity, engagement has now become much quieter.
I recently met an entrepreneur who had developed a mobile app for borrowing umbrellas. He planned to install more than a thousand smart umbrella stands across the city, each fitted with a display, so that advertising revenue could recover his investment and even generate a profit. He had also considered placing advertisements on the umbrellas themselves, but such advertising clearly would not bring in much revenue. I suggested that he consider mobile advertising. After all, this is a mobile app, so displaying ads on phones should be a promising option.
The social TV trend has led to the emergence of many community apps. Most are built around location-based services (LBS) and use user information to deliver relevant advertising messages. In their early stages, these services did attract large numbers of clicks and downloads through rewarded viewing and activities such as Shake. Over time, however, these apps can easily find themselves being uninstalled. In the United States, Dunking Donuts partnered with The Weather Channel to offer a native app that let everyone act as a weather station, attracting viewers into stores and increasing store visits. Such advertising campaigns create benefits for the media, the app, the merchant and the audience alike. Custom native advertising developed in close collaboration with media partners is presented more naturally and can even further improve the app’s user experience. Beyond increasing brand awareness, it can also build favourable perceptions and enable deeper interaction with consumers.
People often talk about ecosystems. Within an ecosystem, even large items such as televisions can be given away free, so mobile phones should be even easier to give away. Yet there currently seem to be very few phones available for free. Many of the various free-phone projects in business plans are difficult to put into practice. Is this actually possible, then? With advertising, such phones should indeed be possible to give away. Using them, however, would certainly involve considerable inconvenience. Switching on the phone would expose users to all kinds of advertisements, much like walking down a street where advertising space is everywhere.
I also recently came across a proposed television programme called “APP Survival”. The idea was for participants to earn money within apps, spend money through apps, and obtain the greatest returns within a limited time and a limited selection of apps. During our discussion, someone immediately said that WeChat should be blocked first. Indeed, WeChat is currently the largest gateway to the mobile internet. Many native apps cannot compete with such a large platform. Yet it is also difficult to imagine even a platform of this size meeting the needs of every kind of advertiser. Users still need useful, valuable native apps, and these are precisely what advertisers need too.
Native app advertising does not interrupt the user experience and can even enrich a platform’s content. Its effectiveness far exceeds that of traditional internet advertising, making it a current trend in mobile advertising. Advertisers, agencies and media platforms can work together to create excellent informational or entertainment content that consumers willingly click on and actively share. This is what makes a native app successful.
http://www.hksilicon.com/articles/1187955