By Matevž Klanjšek, January 23, 2012
When Adobe abandoned its mobile Flash product last month, the general emotional reaction was rather predictable, yet strangely irrelevant: Steve Jobs was right. He indeed was, but truth be told, Flash was never going to be a serious contender in the mobile arena and Jobs was always going to be right. The abandonment of mobile Flash is an important milestone for the mobile industry, not only for video or games, but also for mobile display advertising, where it carries more of a symbolic value versus practical implications
Although the mobile advertising industry never really considered accepting Flash as its technological platform, it is constantly looking at the online world for ideas and concepts, and is largely emulating the approaches of online display advertising, which has been continuously dominated by Flash.
With its ubiquitous Flash player, Flash mainly stands out as a symbol of standardization in online display. But despite the advent of HTML5 enabled mobile devices, that symbol is still casting a shadow over mobile. HTML5 is largely seen as a Flash replacement — a technology that will do for mobile display what Flash did for online — uniform ad products that can be built by anyone and can be published anywhere.
Standardization of online display advertising has evolved organically. Online display advertising originating on web portals (later joined by blogs), were so incredibly fragmented that standardization was a necessity. Flash technology made things easy — it served not only as a creation tool but, more importantly, as a distribution platform. Flash ads could run on any website and could be tracked consistently.
Mobile is significantly different on both fronts.
First, the media landscape has changed dramatically. Early adopters were social, entertainment, and other services, versus portals, which command a huge majority of the mobile audience. In addition, these varying properties appeared more or less at once, causing two key effects:
- The media landscape is less fragmented, and a much smaller number of properties are needed to achieve the desired reach and demography. Ad products standardization across them would help, but it’s no longer necessary.
- Display advertising, which in the online world is inherent to the “portals”, is considered a relevant ad product for all mobile services. Standardized ad products simply don’t work anymore, thanks to the variation in both content and user experience that.
Second, ad creation and distribution are equally different. While authoring tools outputting HTML5 based ads are quickly improving and will soon solve the creation problem, distribution will be too difficult to standardize. At the moment, the market is flooded with various SDK solutions. Even MRAID, which is the most supported standardization initiative, is unlikely to garner the same authority Flash has in the online world. It will take a lot of time, effort and resources to produce a default starting point for online display advertising.
Thus, online might not be the best model for classic display advertising but could offer some useful insight into the direction that mobile is moving to. Recently, there are two trends dominating the online world: the rise of ad exchanges, and a shift towards social ads. The unprecedented growth of Facebook’s advertising business is a proven illustration of the undergoing changes.
Here’s a simple exercise to understand what is happening and why. Think of any online display ad that’s not Flash — or, even better, any online display ad at all. Banner blindness is at least as much the consequence of ad standardization as it is of trashy creatives. Just look at Facebook and try to imagine 728x90px and 300x250px standard size Flash ads stuck somewhere in the header and in the right sidebar. Would you click that? Would you still be using Facebook? Facebook advertising is growing more than 100 percent a year because it has developed fantastic ad products that don’t hinder the content and leverage the unique social capabilities of the network. These ad products can only live on Facebook, making them specific, unique, and special.
This does not mean that there won’t be standardization in mobile advertising. Standardization still makes a lot of sense for long tail inventory that will be increasingly sold through ad exchanges. Premium publishers, on the other hand, will probably try to develop custom, more intelligent, engaging and sensitive ad products to monetize their valuable audience more effectively.
Mobile advertising is, much like its online sibling, an industry where technology meets the art of persuasion. Today, much of the effort in this young industry is concentrated around infrastructure — automation and ease of use — and rightly so. Enabling ads to run efficiently and helping advertisers easily launch campaigns is absolutely essential. But it must never be forgotten that, at the end of the day, advertising is completely consumer-driven. Standardized products, supported by intelligent machines, create efficiencies for the industry at large. That said, humans are not robots. Ad products have to be targeted at the consumer — their behavior, needs and desires must be the impetus driving the innovation behind everything. They have to appeal to the consumer. And only when they do, they will suck less.