Mobile Native Advertising Yields the Biggest Wins [Ad Week]
Experts from Rubicon Project, InMobi, Business Insider, and Heineken discuss the native advertising opportunities around mobile and how these can lead to increased conversion.
Mobile native ads are changing the landscape for publishers, brands, and marketers and creating the greatest opportunites to engage with audiences, according to Greg Raifman, president of Rubicon Project.
Opening a mobile and native panel session during Advertising Week, Raifman referred to recent research from the Rubicon Project, which showed that demand for mobile native ads is larger than ever and this is expected to increase further into 2015. Native mobile ads deliver five-times higher yield for publishers and six-times greater conversions for brands and marketers over traditional banner ads.
“Mobile native is a perfect storm of content and context,” he said, while another panelist, Stephanie Sarofian, executive director at InMobi, added that native advertising is the “form and function” of the mobile environment.
Native advertising certainly seems to engage better with audiences as opposed to the traditional banner ad. According to panelist Emily Allen, senior vice president of sales development at Business Insider, readers tend to prefer the native experience because it is far less distracting and much more authentic.
“We’ve had a lot of success with short Vine-like ads that we’ve been serving [on mobile],” she noted, adding that banner ads are rarely clicked on.
For brands, using a mobile native strategy can enable a segmentation between audiences. One example of this is Heineken’s use of contextual creatives for its recently released Desperados product.
Desperados is a tequila-flavored beer and is only sold in the Southeast region of the U.S. It is aimed at a specific type of consumer interested in nightlife, as opposed to one that prefers to sit and watch sports at home on a Sunday. So Heineken ran mobile ads targeted at specific times of the week. Within three weeks, the beer brand went from zero to 23 percent brand awareness.
“What we’re attributing this success to is context and personalization [in native]. Using the right type of media [mobile] in front of the right person at the right time when they’re most receptive to it,” said panelist Ron Amram, senior media director at Heineken.
Amram pointed out that while native ads present great opportunites, especially on mobile, it’s important for them to be executed appropriately. They need to be dynamic and authentic, he said, concluding that if they blend into the content too much they become wallpaper.
Title image via Shutterstock.
