Advertising on mobile
Its all about stopping the thumb
AFP
AFP, NEW YORK: Almost 80 years old, the deodorant Old Spice is learning new tricks for finding customers in the era of smartphones and social media.
The Procter Gamble product, having spoofed itself for years with advice on how to become more mantastic, posts to its 2.6 million Facebook followers a steady stream of video games, prize entries, and advertisements as short as two seconds.
Creating thumb-stopping content is the goal, and marketers are doing everything they can to achieve it. That includes using neuroscience to study which visual and audio cues offer the best bet to grabbing and keeping an impatient smartphone users attention.
Estimates show that the average person looks at his or her smartphone as much as 150 times a day. The attention is there, but its just not long-lived.
You get the three-second audition, said Frank Amorese, media director at Heineken USA. If you are relying on the 14th or 15th second to do the heavy lifting of the ad, its not going to work.
Advertisers are in a dizzying race to connect with customers as new mobile-borne social media platforms emerge and evolve.
The landscape changes every six months, Amorese said. Its changing at an increasingly fast rate.
Digital ad spending is projected to reach $72.1 billion in 2016, growing at a rate of 21 per cent and now comprising almost 37 per cent of the overall market, according to eMarketer. Social media accounts for $15.4 billion of this. Heineken has doubled its spending on digital ads to 30 per cent over the last five years.
The dominance of smaller mobile devices has heightened the challenge of capturing the attention of potential shoppers.
Ads must be tailored depending on whether they are being seen on a widescreen television, a tablet or a smartphone and must not demand too much time if a consumer is merely glancing at a feed and not planning on a lengthy stay.
We have to really identify how do consumers engage with every single platform and then what is the creative experience we need to give them, said PG chief brand officer Marc Pritchard at the four-day Advertising Week conference in New York this week. But it also has to look like one brand because people have 5,000 ads coming at them every day and thats 10 times what it was just 10 years ago.
