Mobile - Katz Marketing Solutions | Radio Advertising | Media Agency

The earliest mobile advertising took the form of display ads: Banners and boxes, scaleddown from the ones seen on larger computer screens.―It was the new kid in town a couple years ago, and some companies just ruined it,‖ saysBernard Asselin, president of Montreal-based ad agency Bleublancrouge. ―They werethrowing in advertising that was not adapted to any mobile device. You could barely readwhat was in there.‖It‘s a syndrome that Google Canada‘s head of mobile advertising, Eric Morris, refers toas ―shoehorning‖ – trying to make old ad formats work in places they don‘t fit.Not only are banners hard to read on a mobile device, they‘re even more unwelcome thanon a PC. ―On mobile, the annoyance rate is higher than on my laptop,‖ Mr. Asselin said.―So it [an ad] has to be more personalized, more subtle. Not intrusive.‖In contrast to banner ads, the most successful transition to mobile has been in searchadvertising, where Google rules, draining away ad dollars from old-guard media.Google users are already looking for information. So when Google responds with results,whether on a PC or a mobile device, it does not feel like an intrusion, even thoughconsumers know some of those results are paid forBut even for Google, mobile is still a work in progress. It wasn‘t until recently that thecompany made it possible for advertisers to manage online search campaigns and mobilebuys through a single process. Before, Mr. Morris explains, they had to buy adsseparately and micro-manage a raft of different campaigns.That said, Google is still trying to convince advertisers to use the features it has alreadyput in place for mobile. Although advertisers can include ―click-to-call‖ buttons in theirsearch results – an option that boasts a 6 to 8 per cent uptick in click-through rates – onlyabout one in 10 in Canada have bought in.Going past search-based advertising on the scale of consumer utility can produce not justa hookup but brand affinity – or so the Oscars of advertising said implicitly last week. Itwas only the second year that the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity gavean award for mobile advertising, and for the second year, the Grand Prix in Mobile didnot go to an ad in the traditional sense.This year‘s winner was a product developed for a telecom company in the Philippines. Itcoded textbooks on to SIM cards that slip into even the most low-budget mobile phones.Children received digital access to school materials, without needing the sort of fancytablets or Web-enabled smartphones that their families cannot afford.Last year, the winner was a campaign by Google that re-imagined the old I’d Like to Buythe World a Coke song. It placed special vending machines, hooked up to a mobilenetwork, in public areas around the world. Anyone with a smartphone could send the7