How Can Mobile Advertising Be More Appealing? Native App Advertising May Be the Answer

When it comes to advertising, most consumers react negatively. Ordinary consumers cannot avoid advertisements broadcast through public media, but they can block mobile advertisements with apps such as Ad Block. Advertising on phones therefore requires careful strategy. In the early days of advertising on WeChat Moments, people eagerly interacted with ads because they knew doing so would make them visible to their friends. After several bursts of excitement, engagement has 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 around the city, each fitted with a display screen, so that advertising revenue could recover his investment and even generate a profit. He had also considered placing advertisements on the umbrellas themselves, but those ads clearly would not generate much revenue. I suggested that he consider mobile advertising. After all, this was a mobile app, so displaying advertisements within it should be a promising option.

The trend towards social television has led to the emergence of many community apps. Most are built around location-based services (LBS), using user information to deliver relevant advertising messages. In their early days, these services did attract substantial numbers of clicks and downloads through rewards for watching and activities similar to Shake. Over time, however, these apps can easily face the awkward prospect of being uninstalled. In the United States, Dunking Donuts partnered with The Weather Channel to offer a native APP that lets everyone act as a weather station, attracting viewers into stores and increasing store visits. Such advertising campaigns benefit the media, the app, merchants and viewers alike. Customised native advertising developed in close collaboration with media outlets is presented more naturally and can even improve the app’s user experience. Besides increasing brand awareness, it can build positive sentiment towards the brand and enable deeper engagement with consumers.

People often talk about ecosystems. Within an ecosystem, even large items such as televisions can be given away for free, so mobile phones should be even easier to give away. Yet there seem to be very few phones available for free at present. Many of the various free-phone projects described in business plans prove difficult to put into practice. Is this actually possible? With advertising, such phones should certainly be possible to give away. Using one, however, would inevitably create considerable awkwardness. Switching on the phone would expose you to all kinds of advertisements, much like walking down a street where advertising space is everywhere.

I also recently came across an idea for a television programme called “APP Survival”. The programme would ask participants to earn money through apps, spend money through apps, and maximise their returns within a limited time using a limited selection of apps. During the discussion, someone immediately suggested that WeChat should be blocked first. Indeed, WeChat is currently the largest gateway to the mobile internet. Many native apps cannot compete with a platform of its scale. Yet it is also difficult to imagine such a large platform meeting the needs of every type of advertiser. Users still need useful, valuable native apps, and these are precisely what advertisers need as well.

Native app advertising does not interrupt the user experience and can even enrich a platform’s content. It is far more effective than traditional internet advertising and is 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 proactively share. That is what makes native apps successful.
http://www.hksilicon.com/articles/1187955