Brands Fight Ad Blindness With Interactive Experiences

Brands like Target, Shazam, and The Home Depot are increasingly making interactive mobile ads, while also taking decreasing user attention spans into consideration.

Mobile adoption has grown significantly over the last few years, and the prevalence of mobile use has led to an oversaturation of mobile ads, leaving many users ad blind.

To remedy user burnout, Target has created interactive mobile advertisements as part of a new partnership with Shazam. Target customers can now “Shazam” QR codes, as well as print and TV ads, and be brought to the items’ product listing pages.

Many brands, like Target, are opting to make products and advertisements interactive because greater mobile adoption has led to shorter attention spans. Studies have found that three-quarters of users will abandon a mobile site that takes more than five seconds to load.

Peter Szabo, senior vice president of music and ad sales at Shazam, points out that often in the case of retail websites, people will lose interest in an item that takes too long to find.

“Everything these days, if it takes longer than five seconds, people move onto something else. We live in an instant gratification world; that’s just the way it is,” Szabo says. “If you don’t provide solutions for consumers to be able to capitalize on something in the moment, you’re going to lose them.”

Joe Laszlo, senior director of the IAB’s Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence, thinks Shazamable ads, which Disney and Levi’s are also using, highlight the growing importance of mobile to the consumer journey, from discovery to purchase.

“I think it’s a really interesting next stop in their evolution, going from audio recognition to doing video recognition, as well,” Laszlo says. “There’s kind of a broader realization that phones are these incredible bundles of sensors – accelerometers and cameras and video – that all create opportunities for services to make our lives a little bit easier, but also create new opportunities to engage with brands and advertising, as well.”

Laszlo names The Home Depot as another brand that does mobile advertising particularly well. The home improvement retailer deploys location-based ads based on the weather, promoting shovels to customers in Boston while showing different ads to consumers in Phoenix.

Very, an online British retailer, has just launched mobile ads based on meteorology, as well. Assessing consumers’ locations, Very is promoting items like sunglasses and umbrellas depending on the local weather.

“A lot of what people are most tempted to do with mobile ads these days are cool bells and whistles. It’s worth highlighting and celebrating brands like Home Depot where the ads have a lot of interactive features, but they’re useful,” Laszlo says, adding that Very’s campaign is also clever. “Finding ways to use these data feeds not just for a special purpose but to weave them into the basic message of an ad campaign is pretty rare.”

Laszlo hasn’t seen many mobile ads around voice recognition, but he expects those to become more common in the future. For example, an airline could have ads with Siri or Cortana capabilities that ask, “Where would you like to go on vacation?” before pulling up relevant deals on flights.

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