• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 9, 2013

When a doctor is running an hour and a half late, pretty much the entire waiting room is a sitting duck for mobile media and marketing. In the future, mobile marketing will be able to target more than just user behavior, profiles, location and all of the usual dayparting. At some point, when everyday annoyances like real-time wait times get folded into the data mix, marketers will be able to target points of boredom on a map and know that these are people who will be entertained by just about anything.

For me, at about the 45-minute mark of waiting for my ophthalmologist I was already burning through half of my iPhone’s battery life and exhausting all of the usual app suspects. It was then that I remembered I had Tumblr. With its emphasis on images and animated GIFs from a number of very creative sources to which I subscribe, this feed is crack for me. I just truly tumble through its relentless scroll.

Where else am I going to find pop-culture archivists like myself who appreciate a great screen grab or three-second animation from a Fatty Arbuckle film of a century ago or the early Walt Disney animated shorts back when Mickey Mouse had some balls? National Geographic has a wonderful new feed that draws from its own 125-year archive of stunning imagery. Esquire magazine partners with the cheesecake photo project called MeInMyPlace that features long runs of lingerie images of young models and actresses in their own apartments.

This platform is energizing because it has successfully attracted creative ideas, and the output creates for the user a deep well of eye candy. For me, this is mobile entertainment at its best and at its most mobilized. The form, the format, and the creativity seem to be perfect fits for that stray mobile moment the user wants filled.

And so the native ad format that Tumblr recently brought to the mobile feed is especially interesting because at least so far, it is faithful to the spirit of the content around. This is no small thing when it comes to “native” ad formats, which I have seen used to describe simply shoving a standard banner in the middle of a headline scroll.

The campaign for The Great Gatsby inserts into my feed on rare but welcome occasions a very short animated GIF that captures another moment from the film. They are artfully chosen -- a high-kicking flapper here, a champagne toast there -- to capture the debauchery that I understand the film is trying to extract from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. And frankly, I find these in-stream snippets more compelling and communicative about the movie than the longer-form TV spots that leave me on the fence about seeing the movie.

I think advertisers often make the mistake of believing that their promotional spots and ads convince people of something in a shallow, argumentative way. But I believe that the recipient of marketing messages is more often convinced by the sensibility that an ad conveys. I think consumers ask themselves whether the people who made this message are anything like them or understand them in a substantial way. I think we pass judgments on a company’s competence in some measure by how well it can construct a message to us, and not always based on the content of the message. The Tumblr ads suggest that the filmmakers "get me" enough to know this is the sort of image nibble I will appreciate.

But just as some of the best sponsored posts from Buzzfeed also show, this series of native ads is true to the name. And they speak to how mobile media gives marketers the opportunity to make real something that they have been promising and gesturing toward now for a decade –- to create entertaining experiences that enhance rather than interrupt a moment. But at the same time they have the opportunity to humanize their own brands by aligning more carefully and subtly with audience sensibilities and tastes.