Thursday, February 21, 2013

Mobile Advertising in 2013

It is interesting to know that Google has pioneered Internet Advertising across the globe and its empire primarily gets to innovate and expand because of its thriving advertising business. The advertisements (ads in short) started in print medium long back and after evolution through different formats has moved into television domain. With the dawn of Internet followed by search and social media revolution, it made absolute sense to present the ads through this medium as well.

With the access to Internet changing from Desktops / Laptops to Mobile devices - smartphones and tablets - the need to shift the ads to this new form-factor of devices has become inevitable. The challenge in placing ads in mobile devices is the size of the device screens. With so little real-estate space on-screen to show the main content, there would be little left to display ads.

There are quite a few opportunities to tag along ads under 'Mobile' advertising:

  1. Ads along with web content (news sites like Times Of India)
  2. Ads interspersed along with the content (like in Facebook)
  3. Ads in fixed position - typically bottom - in any mobile application including games and education content
  4. Ads along with multimedia content (like in Youtube)
  5. Classifieds Applications (like sulekha or yellowpages)
  6. Deals Applications (Dealchaat)
  7. Video Ads (what facebook plans to launch shortly)
  1. Ads sent as direct sms messages or embedded into free sms messages
  2. Location-based Ads

With more content being consumed on the mobile devices now, certainly there would be more scope for ads placement in the context of various mobile applications in future.

The Ad ecosystem typically consists of Advertisers (like HUL and MakeMyTrip) and Publishers (like Times Of India and Rediff) with Ad-Networks (AdMob from Google, InMobi) to bridge them. From the functionality perspective, not much has changed in the Internet ad-world for the last few years; but, there is significant improvement in the business models, reach or coverage and analytics on the ads showcased to provide performance reports.

With convergence of traditional media (print, television and radio), communications (telecom networks) and Internet, the scope for more ad-business in Mobile domain is only bound to increase in future.

I might buy more Noodles or Panneer in a neighbouring outlet soon, influenced by the contextual Ads on my Mobile :-)