Ranking Mobile Advertising Forms

Trawling through my reading pile this weekend (it was Bank Holiday in the UK), I happened upon a free M-Metrics white paper that was sponsored by a shortcode (or common short code) provider in the US. It is essentially a plug for using shortcodes and puts forward a strong case as to why advertisers should choose this type of mobile marketing over others. It was produced in late 2007, but I think the arguements are still very relevant.

You could read the whole report here, but actually its pretty well summarised in the table above.

I agree with most of the scoring here. However, some of the points are debatable;

Ease of creative execution is an odd one. The rationale behind the low scores for mobile web and search is that its hard to make ads that will render properly on a range of handsets. However, if you comply with MMA guidelines, then your banner ads should render on most phones, they just may not be as creatively rich on lower end devices. I guess that does require some extra design time, but lots of ads on mobile are text only in any case, so creatively they are easy to execute, especially if you have a full-time copywriter like we do at We Love Mobile. As for search ads, most of these (apart from the new google banner option) are text based, so, again, are actually pretty easy to execute if you have the writing resource and understand the medium.

At We Love Mobile, we’ve recently done some MMS advertising, and can tell you for free that while MMS offers more creative possibilities, executing a creatively rich MMS and successfully broadcasting to a range of handsets is anything but easy! They do, however, give the kind of branded visual impact you simply can’t achieve with SMS, so are worth it in the end. But easy, no!

Which brings me onto the question of creative use of SMS. You might ask, how can text be creative? Well, the fact of the matter is that you can work wonders with 160 characters or so (and you can also make alot of mistakes!). We are releasing a short guide to creative and strategic use of shortcodes and SMS in a few weeks time, so I won’t spoil the surprise - but simple things, like ensuring the sender ID is branded or that the message is in your comapany’s tone of voice, all add to the effectiveness of a ’simple’ text communication. The guide will be full of other do’s and don’ts. If you want to be sent a copy when it’s released, drop us a line at info@welovemobile.co.uk.

Also posted on www.welovemobile.co.uk