• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, June 11, 2015

It’s the oddest thing. The evolution of smartphones and the way they’re used, would seem to be anything but smart. 

For one, the phone part seems to kind of a waste; nobody talks anymore. Just a few days ago JPMorgan Chase eliminated voice mail from many of its offices, because, well, people text.

Then there’s mobile video. People do watch that. But when it comes to mobile video advertising--which, I know, ism't high on the list of reasons consumers love smartphones--the big

thing now is to not talk in ads. And not moving probably isn’t a bad idea, either.

At the IAB’s Digital Video Marketplace day of conferences earlier this week, two executives from Celtra laid down the basic rules of the mobile video advertising road, as it’s evolving. And it’s kind of like this, if you ask me: Take a nice full-page ad, have a video camera grab at three images from it and superimpose about two, maybe three, short sentences onto a video. And shut up. No volume, please. That could be a perfect smartphone video ad. That’s not what Celtra says. That’s what I gleaned.

A lot of marketers are realizing that for smartphones, silence is golden. The Wall Street Journal quoted the digital manager for Ben & Jerry’s, who noted that where he works, ironically, the idea of  creating soundless ads without words is something “we talk about all the time.”

Gefen Lamden, vice president of product for Celtra, told the audience at a seminar that there are three rules for video ads that hope to be successful:

1) The video should play vertically, not horizontally. Nobody is going to turn their smartphone sideways to watch a commercial--98% of consumers are using a vertical image. That’s down to 60% on a tablet.

2) An ad should last no more than ten seconds, because she says, our attention span is now about 8 seconds. (Which means I probably lost you midway through the first paragraph.)

3) Videos should be mute, because that’s how 90% of the users watch videos, probably because they want to avoid the blare of advertising jumping out at them.

Lambden and Anthony Mazzarella, the senior vice president of U.S agency sales for Celtra, showed a few good ads in their video with sound versions (the ones that play on TV or elsewhere) and the same, severely-cut down message on a smartphone where the script is replaced by a few punch descriptive words that describe it. That kind of thing works. “The media is not the message,” Mazzarella told the IAB crowd. “The creative is the message.” (Some media, I guess you could argue, screw up the creative.)

As he points out 64% of U.S. display ad buys will be via mobile by next year, and Facebook video, which runs without volume, have increased by 400% in the last six months. So, to rework an old adage, KISS--keep is silent, stupid.

It seemed to me, watching the cut-down ads, that movement in those ten seconds was distracting, and sort of pointless. Lambden didn’t exactly agree wholeheartedly but she nodded in a way that made me feel good about myself, and she did say that for some luxury brands and goods--perfume, jewelry, expensive cars and so on--full-length ads already run in a nearly-stopped slo-mo. So I’m going to say I’m sort of right.

I asked Mazzarella after the seminar if advertisers have a hard time signing off on advertising that has no volume. No, he told me, because they see the research. What they have a hard time with is spending all that money on a TV commercial talkie and seeing it turned into a 10-second soundless blip on a mobile screen.

pj@mediapost.com