Like everyone who is cool, I carry a smartphone. Although I use it most frequently to email, text or make calls, I also use its apps to get me out of sticky situations, find information or simply for entertainment purposes, and as I navigate the relatively large 4 inch iPhone retina display, 326 PPI screen, I encounter a ever-expanding plethora of teeny tiny advertisements.
Next time you click on your favourite game - Flappy Birds - notice the tiny banner ad at the top or bottom - smaller than your finger – that just says “free”. I’d like to pretend that it was simply for the research of this paper that I clicked on it, but I do like free stuff, and so probably would have done so anyway. My game of Flappy Birds disappeared, and I was greeted
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Historically, there are “teething” periods when new platforms emerge. An example of this would be the slow uptake to advertise on T.V in the 40’s and 50’s, and the Internet in the 90’s. Rather than utilising these new mediums to their full potential, advertisers would simply adapt techniques that had worked on old medias. A particular pertinent example of this would be the 40’s T.V commercials, in which an actor would talk directly into the camera; essentially a radio advert with picture. This same thinking is the reason why early websites were packed with static display ads taken directly from print adverts. Unsurprisingly, neither proved effective forms of advertising. New media requires a new approach, new thinking, new advertising methods and those that adapt over time. THE SAME WILL BE TRUE OF MOBILE.
I believe that the best way for advertisers to communicate through mobile will be with apps. Apps will be more effects than methods used already because they won’t be perceived as “adverts”. Consumers will value them for their functionality and as a result will not find them intrusive. For advertisers, apps will also be attractive because they’re actually more cost-effective than traditional adverts, and they sometimes create completely new revenue streams. Apps have the capacity to be monetised, which, essentially
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Like all good advertising, understanding the consumer is a vital key to engagement.
After spending some time looking at the top downloaded Apps from the Apple store we can sort of see a number of repeated strategies.
Convenience. Most airlines provide Apps where you can check in, monitor specific flight details and statuses. Most banks provide apps that let their customers check their balance, transfer money and pay bills. BBC sport app lets sport fanatics check scores as they happen. Sure, this is nothing new, you can do all this on the Internet, however, Apps allow smartphone users to access this information quickly (most smartphones have faster processors than laptops) and smoothly. And with every balance check, flight check in and ____ is exposing the consumer to the brand.
Convenience Apps give advertisers a great opportunity to ____ but they anrt wiout they’re constraints. Firstly, although they can strengthen relationships with already established customers, they aren’t very good at acquiring new ones (banking Apps for example). As more and more brands introduce convenience Apps to the consumer it will become increasing difficult to differentiate them from the