Saturday, March 07, 2015

Smart Phone Ads limitation and comparison

I read this article from New York Times that has some discussion about mobile ads on smartphone platforms. The article ”Smart Phone Ads and Their Drawbacks" is written by Randall Stross.

We are looking at hundreds of ads on browsers everywhere everyday. It seems impossible to avoid looking at these ads. Compared to desktop, laptop and tablet browsers, smart(mobile) phone ads have some drawbacks. One significant advantage of browsers ads other than smart phone ads is that marketers can track customers's reactions or feedbacks. In the digital marketing class, professor showed us the summary statistics website that how many customers click and follow up their ads in the email campaign. I think viewers' reactions to website ads from desktop browsers can be monitored in the same way. For example, how many customers click on the ad and then make the purchase or how many people open the link. However, when it comes to smartphone ads, this kind of track actions function is limited and things become challenging.

Other drawbacks of smartphones are that people are usually not willing to spend too much time on smartphone ads. Since the screen size is limited and people usually spend short amount of time on it, smartphones ads is hard to catch enough attention of phone users as desktop ads do. Other researchers said that context is most important point for smart phone ads. On the other hands, some smartphone platforms are doing a good job. I think the reason these platforms do well is that it does not create too much distraction for phone users. Pandora and Twitter are doing well because they can incorporate ads smoothly into the apps based on the article. And app location related service is also an advantage of smartphone apps.

The link for the article I read is http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/technology/smartphone-ads-and-their-drawbacks-digital-domain.html.

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