The importance of mobile advertising is unequivocal. It is estimated that by 2014, half of American web browsing will be done on mobile devices. According to BIA/Kelsey, the U.S. mobile ad revenues expected to hit $28 billion by 2015 which also means that, the number of mobile advertisements being created are increasing every month.

Mobile ad creation is a relatively new industry with new technologies and new creative design challegenes. As in all advertising, creative concept and art direction are still the pillars of an effective ad. But with all new mediums of communication, there are always new factors to consider in making a effective advertisement suited for the mobile medium.

In this article, the MobDis team has laid out 7 tips and ideas to help you in your process of making that mind blowing mobile rich media ad.

Control

Let your users be in control. Individually, each person’s top favorite may differ from another. In the Stay Hilton, Go Everywhere iAd, it allows users to find the destination that they would most like to visit.

This increases the interests and engagement as it allows your users the freedom to access content that interests them and at the pace that they would like. In addition, the element of exploration generates extra excitement within the environment. 

It is useful that you have a “skip” button for your users too, so they would not leave your ad entirely. Again, control is key.

Think Outside the Rectangle

What lies within the rectangle is important, but you have to think of what other features you can include to your iAd to increase the interactivity of the application. Add music, videos to your iAd or leverage on tools like tap, swipe, spin, shake, & more!

You can even make your ad feel like it is a part of an experience. Tap into the similarities between your product to the functionalities of phone, you can illustrate and make known to your viewers the features of your product.  Additionally, you can integrate it with tv commercials and print ads just like in the AXA ad.

Social Factor

Your ad should be able to share your great message with other individuals. Include a sharing function into you ad to increase the virality of your message. An example is seen in the Liberty Mutual ad where viewers can share their deed to a poll, this is a great tool to encourage other users to do a good dead through the idea of competitive altruism. 

Words

Place important and strategic content to the users but go easy on the words. We know you love writing, but users don’t like reading too much on phone. Instead of writing your address, have an interactive map, or instead of listing your phone number, integrate a “add to contacts” / “call now” button. 

Call to action

-to-action button serves the purpose to the objective of your advertisement. Ask yourself what do you want to achieve, if is a coupon deal, include a button for users to redeem this.This is the best way to ensure response a to your message.

Optimize

Always put out variations to test on the responses of your ads before you roll out all your resources. There are many tools to track the user engagement level. Good indicators of a good advertisements are the number of exits of the ad, engagement time and the amount of clicks to call-to-action.

Load Time

Make sure your ad is not too media heavy that users would click out of the ad before the ad shows. A guide is to assume a download rate of 100kB per second for your ad. If you need to have media heavy ads, a method is to show a splash screen while the ad loads. Additionally, good programming habits can help you optimize the load time. Good tip for keeping the loading time low is to put your javascripts and css into one .js and .css file.

All in all, we hope these 7 tips will help you create a great mobile advertisment. Of course, a bit of creativity helps!