As the mobile space continues to heat up, advertising on this ubiquitous channel continues to evolve. What paved way for native advertising today and how is it related to mobile advertising today and where is it going to?
In this presentation, Lichi Wu, Senior Director of Native Advertising at glispa GmbH gave a glimpse into native advertising to the audience at Startup Camp Berlin 2015 at Humboldt University.
5. | 5
Lichi – About me
Google -> AdMob -> 2 (failed) startups -> Millennial Media
Singapore China Japan
Indonesia Taiwan Korea
Thailand Hong Kong India
Malaysia Australia
8. | 8
Card Design Patterns
Credit: Taylor Davidson, http://taylordavidson.com/2014/cards
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IAB suggest a Native Evaluation Framework
• Form
• Function
• Integration
• Buying and targeting
• Measurement
• Disclosure
What is Native Advertising?
10. | 10
According to multiple studies conducted by
Sharethrough & IPG Media Labs:
• Consumers look at native ads 52% more than banner ads
• Native ads registered 18% higher lift for purchase intent
• 13% more consumers said they would share a native ad
with a friend
• Consumers look at native ads almost same amount of time
as original editorial content (1 sec vs 1.2 sec)
Source: http://www.sharethrough.com/portfolio-item/native-ad-research-from-ipg-sharethrough-
reveals-that-in-feed-beats-banners/
Is Native better?
11. | 11
Data signals – What makes direct
response mobile campaigns work
• Interests – e.g. Installed app on device
• Locations – on-the-spot and home/work
location targeting
• Cross devices and re-targeting – Follow
users as they go form PC to phone to
wearable
What are the trends
12. | 12
Performance campaigns (install
ads) drive majority of ad revenue
What can you do today?
Work with your native advertising
providers to build a good user
experience
13. | 13
Make mobile advertising better
Help people discover products that enrich their lives
glispa’s company vision
This is usually how my Friday night goes..
I go into a bar and order a drink, start chatting with the person next me.
After a few pleasantries, inevitably this question comes up..
“So what do you do for a living?” “Oh, I’m in mobile advertising”
“You mean like, Das Auto?” “Oh, no no no. On mobile phones. Mobile phone advertising.”
“Oh! So you’re person responsible for those annoying ads!”
Hallo. My name is Lichi Wu, and I’m the Senior Director of Native Advertising, at glispa.
Some of you might be thinking, who is guy why is he speaking? Well, there are many other also qualified people who can speak on the topic. But they are probably all hung over from last night. So you get me.
But I have been in mobile advertising for some time…
I started lucky, getting a job at Google in Mountain View, after university, back in 2005.
And after a year, they asked me if I wanted to move to Singapore for their new office, after 3 seconds of serious contemplating, I said yes.
So there I was, in Singapore.
And after a few years I decided to leave the big mothership, to join an unknown startup called AdMob. 2 months into the job, google bought admob. So I left and join 2 even smaller startups both in mobile and related to advertising. Unfortunately both failed. And that was the time I joined Millennial Media. At millennial I built, and lead the publisher team for APAC, and grew the business from almost nothing to 150 times bigger.
During that decade in Singapore, I traveled extensively within SE Asia, China, Taiwan and HK, and also Japan. Also did significant business in markets like Korea, India and Australia.
So, I know a thing or two about mobile advertising. But before we jump into main topic, native advertising, let’s look at mobile advertising today…
There are 3 forms of mobile advertising today: Banners, interstitials, and Offer walls. What are the issues associated with each of these?
Banners: Takes up a fix amount of screen real estate. gets in the way of content consumption. easy to develop "banner blindness“
It is the lowest common denominator. Simply a relic from the web era
Interstitials, there are 2 forms: Image and video. They pop up unexpectedly, cannot be skipped for the first 5 to 7 secs, or even the entirety of 15 or 30 sec ad.
The demand from advertisers is on the rise. But often time implemented in a way that only drives advertiser value but sacrifices user experience
Offer walls: User are incentivized to install an app in exchange for virtual goods or currency.
It has a decent user experience because it’s user initiated, but only address certain advertiser needs – cheap installs, but disregarding user quality)
Given the topic is Native Advertising, is it better? Yes, in many ways it is.
But before we start, I wanted to talk about one of the things that paved way for native advertising.
Nowadays our apps all look something like these, in cards. Cards are an important design evolution. It addresses specific demands of mobile devices and interfaces very effectively. Cards combine an information design pattern with a set of gesture interaction methods, such as swipes, flicks). They are part of the evolution from web pages to web streams to mobile streams, leading up to feed-based content model used by web and mobile apps.
But underneath the design, there is a significance of information architecture behind the cards. Mobile apps today such as Twitter, Google, WhatsApp all use cards to deliver first-party content from an internal API, but utilizes the structured interface of a card to display data from third-parties. For example, Tinder uses a card to display first-party content from Tinder, while Google+ and Twitter use the structured display of a card to display third party content.
It is in the combination of the design cue and information architecture, that paved the way to leveraging cards as a more effective way of advertising
Because Native Advertising is still nascent, IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, suggest a Native Evaluation Framework for when you’re adopting native ads and selecting a provider.
Form: Does the ad appear within the natural stream of the site?
Function: Does the style of the ad fit seamlessly with the page’s content?
Integration: Does the behavior of the ad mirror that of the host site?
Buying and targeting: Is ad placement targeted to a specific page or designed to work across a network?
Measurement: Are metrics in place to judge success of the ad?
Disclosure: Is the ad clearly and prominently identified?
The framework applie to both advertisers and publishers. So follow this, makes your app more attactive to advertisers that will lead to better monetization.
While native advertising is more effective and strikes a much better balance between user experience and advertiser needs, it is not a silver bullet. So what are the things that could enhance it and help you increase your yield of monetization?
I believe it’s Data Signals. They drive actual performance, be it engagement with ad or post-click activities such as downloads.
So what are the signals?
For Interest targeting: There are many ways to collect users interest. For example, using installed apps on a device, you could derive a user’s interested categories for targeting later. Facebook has many touch points to collect your interest. Onavo, a company Facebook bought monitors data usage. The more data you use for a category, the better they know how to target; Twitter also announce that they are scanning installed apps to deliver "tailored content"; it would not surprise that Yahoo with its Flurry Analytics isn't already doing this. And may other system utilities type apps are also mining such data, e.g. cleaning, optimizing type of apps
For location targeting: if an app collects location data with users' consent, the signals can be used for targeting by marketers. to go further, there are companies that analyze users' location signals in conjunction of time of day, and you can derive a unique user's home and work address for targeting purposes. Collecting and building such data assets takes time, and you need statisticians to make sense and turn them into usable data.
For cross device and retargeting: unlike computers, mobile phones have a 1-to-1 relationship with a unique user. Combining devices IDs and other signals such as email address, it is easy to target users across devices - from desktop to phone to tablet and even wearables. it also enables retargeting – i had shown you ad A and you responded positively, I will show you ad B to nudge you into action.
there is no shortage these days with new startups tackling native advertising. Right now brands have not gone full-in on native advertising for various reasons. So the immediate opportunities are in what the industry calls performance campaigns, namely install ads. These are in fact what help turned Facebook's stocks around (opened at $38 in April 2012, dropped to $18 at lowest and did not come back up till mid 2013 when FB turned on app install ads). So leverage performance campaigns.
Work with your native advertising providers on building a good user experience. Steam of cards lends itself very well for non-intrusive ad monetization. which in conjunction of data signals I just mentioned, the industry has a real chance of turning mobile ads into a positive experience.
Truly help people discover products that enrich their lives (which btw is glispa's company vision).
when that day comes, i believe when i tell a stranger what i do, I will see this face. Thank you.