Managing new media

By Sunil Gupta

Like most professionals, I carry a smartphone. I use it frequently for emailing or texting, and use its apps for information and entertainment. And as I navigate its 3.5-inch screen, I routinely encounter something else: a growing stream of itsy-bitsy advertisements.

These Lilliputian ads represent the state of the art in mobile advertising — and few people click on them. In surveys, four out of five people report disliking them… Whenever new media emerge — consider television in the 1940s and 1950s and the World Wide Web in the 1990s — there is a period of fumbling while marketers try to repurpose advertisements that worked in the old media. That’s why early-1950s’ television commercials featured narrators reading what were essentially radio advertisements, and why 1990s websites were filled with static display ads taken directly from print campaigns.

Neither effort was effective. New media require new methods of advertising, which evolve over time. The same will be true of mobile. The best way for marketers to communicate through mobile will be with apps. Apps will trump traditional ads in part because consumers don’t perceive them as advertising: they value them for their functionality and, so, don’t find them intrusive. For marketers, apps will also be attractive because they’re actually more cost-efficient than traditional ads, and they sometimes create entirely new revenue streams.

From “For Mobile Devices, Think Apps, Not Ads”