Saturday, June 10, 2017

Smartphones are not tiny televisions


In this insightful post by Mark Rabkin, VP of Core Ads,Facebook, he reminded us the one thing to remember about video advertising is that: smartphones are not tiny televisions. It is easy to forget that, especially when a marketer has created a piece of content and is eager to serve the same message across seemingly similar platforms (TV, YouTube, Facebook videos, etc).  

Mobile advertising is a different landscape than digital advertising, and must be seen and treated as such. Seeing it simply as an extension of digital advertising is to ignore how complex the landscape of mobile advertising is.

- People scroll through mobile News Feed 41% faster than desktop News Feed.
- A 2-sec ad view on other platforms, such as YouTube, can be considered a lifetime of Facebook.
- No mobile platform has proven it can sustain run-of-the-mill 30-second spots at the scale TV once provided.

Above are just some data that he rolled off, but it is interesting to see how digital marketers tend to expect, or even demand, similar KPIs in different channels. In his post, Mark was making a case for measuring business value and results on a per-creative, per-platform, per-audience basis. This, to me, was a great reminder on the importance of measuring things right, so as to gauge the success of a campaign. Too often, we digital marketers get overwhelmed by the data that digital offers, and simply ask for topline metrics in order to simplify the results for our own understanding.

One insight he revealed about mobile, which I thought was particularly illuminating, was that it has trained people to focus, choose what's relevant, consume what matters and move on. How marketers understand this nuanced behavior exhibited by their consumers will be crucial to their mobile advertising success.

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