When the country is moving towards mobile friendly platforms, why leave advertisements behind? Adverts or ads are basically meant to promote products or companies or businesses in as effective way as possible. They are short promotional content which serve as the ultimate introduction for the product or brand. They should be appealing enough as to capture the viewer’s attention in that short span of time. So, when you have a really short time to attract viewers, companies need to make the most of this time in order to engage the viewer and drive conversion rates to eventually increase sales and the number of loyal customers.
Mobile devices have become more of a necessity these days. They are the driving force behind the techno frenzy that we are witnessing in our society. What capabilities have we been provided with the advent of smartphones, that it has become impossible to imagine a life beyond them. We can’t even think of going a day without our smartphones. We have grown more dependent than being fond of these smartphones. They are not a technical accessory anymore, they have become kind of a lifeline. The way mobile devices have transformed themselves and reinvented numerous applications and commands associated with them, ads are not left behind. With this evolution we began to see new version of ads. The frequency of internet access gave way to new and improved versions of these ads. Every little application came with its share of ads. How can marketing be behind, when we are tackling such a wide base of audience with smartphones. Marketing crept in the form of interactive ads, like interstitial ads, video ads etc. A lot of apps meant a lot of exposure for brands, they started capitalizing on this by using ads in between to let users know of other similar applications or some related products. They began to invigorate our daily life. Then this invigoration turned into breach of privacy with every single activity of ours being tracked. You might have seen ads related to your behaviour on ecommerce sites, like if you were looking for a printer online, you would see ads related to it whenever you open your mail or visit any other site. However, this behaviour might prove beneficial sometimes but it has to be accepted as a bitter fact. So, we can move on from here and realize the true face of publicity as it is. Thus, it becomes absolutely essential to understand the types of ads on mobile devices, in order to get started to appreciate the ads we have with us. Let us see some major types of ads that we usually see everyday while accessing content on our smartphones.
- Banner ads – these ads only cover a portion of the screen, so that they can be shared with content on your screen. These can be positioned at the top or the bottom of the screen. If the user clicks on these ads, it will take you to a landing page i.e. a new webpage having more information about the content in the ad. These ads can either be text or an image. We might have seen ads in the form of fixed rectangular shaped banners at the screen ends, whether top or bottom, which just stay there. They offer us the freedom to choose whether to click on them or not. These banners drive the natural pace of events and just wait for you to click on them, unlike some ad formats which are hard to ignore.
- Rich media ads – as the name suggests, they contain rich media, which implies high quality graphics, multimedia etc. These ads deliver visually appealing content and thus, can create some strong viewer engagement. These can be in the form of quite graphic banners or might cover the whole screen and offer you a play area in between your app. These are rich in content, so, they can have videos, play screens, graphics etc. They get the viewer to focus on its productivity, like if the presented video or play area is good enough then only it is guaranteed that the user is going to click on the links provided. If the companies fail to attract in this time, then it becomes more of a nuisance than being productive. So, companies need to address this issue and make the ads as interactive and appealing as possible.
- Interstitial ads – usually full screen pop up ads. These are great for catching user’s attention. They capture the entire screen and they are usually difficult to close, as some interstitial ads even have timers with them. You can close such ads only when the timer stops. It’s really important to decide when to show an interstitial ad since your app can not display anything else when playing or displaying an interstitial ad. These are perfect when there’s a natural break in your app, like between levels of a game. In addition to text and image, interstitial ads can also be in video format. You might have seen, whenever you close an app or game, a full screen ad pops up urging you to install another game or application.
- App wall – whenever you are playing a game you might have seen a list of apps that come across, asking you to download. This is known as the app wall and they are displayed when the developers of your game want to publicize other games or apps, also developed by them. Sometimes the sponsor companies get in this space trying to promote their content by displaying a list of products or apps they have developed. These sometimes turn out to be useful as the app wall might provide some beneficial or helpful apps related to your activity on the playstore.
- Video ads – you might have seen video ads a lot of times on YouTube. These can be in the form of banners or as shorter videos before the actual video you are going to watch, which is generally the case. Such ads capture the viewer’s attention for sure. Although some ads contain the ‘skip ad’ button, still a section of them succeed in putting their message across to some extent. Now, realizing the rising popularity of video content, YouTube has removed the skip ad button from many ads which okay to their length before your actual video starts. You might have seen the button saying, the video will start after this ad, in some cases.
- Native ads – give much more freedom to customize the look and feel of the ad. These ads usually have two different templates to accomplish the customization, which are,
- App install native ads – these can drive app installations by advertising the app.
- Content native ads – these allow for a more generic combination of text and images that covers a broader scope.
These were the broad categories of mobile ad formats that we have nowadays. They can further be categorised, for sure, by diving deep into their functioning, purpose, kind of approach and other technical aspects.