• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, September 11, 2017

It's interesting when two pieces of research looking at separate areas of adland come up with logical conclusions that support one another. Neither in itself was the most surprising thing the London ad scene will read today, but together they lead to an obvious conclusion. To survive, mobile advertising has to change -- and social, native and video could hold the key.

Exhibit number one comes from research for InSkin Media carried out by On Device Research. if you were asked to predict the most annoying ad format on a mobile, you would probably easily guess either pop-ups or any type of unit that covers over the content you are trying to access. You would be right. The number one most hated ad unit for Brits is the dreaded pop-up, at 28% of those surveyed. Ads that cover up too much of the screen are the second-biggest gripe at 26% and units that stall downloading pages were annoying for nearly one in five. Irrelevant, badly targeted ads also annoyed one in five users.

To be blunt, as the commissioners of the research readily admit, none of this is "rocket science." We already know as marketers and consumers of mobile internet experiences what people find annoying because we find them irksome too. The fortunate aspect for mobile marketers is that ad blocking appears to be leveling off at around one in five Brits, whereas other countries appear to be overtaking the UK. Perhaps Brits have either learned to accept the intrusive ads as a price worth paying for the content they want to see -- or brands and publishers have been better at toning down. Maybe it's both?

So mobile ads have some annoying formats -- we all know that. The next interesting part is Zenith downgrading ad growth ever so slightly to 2% for 2017 in Western Europe, from a previous 2.2% estimate. The interesting part here is not actually quantified, but it is worth reporting on. Zenith is confident that digital will continue to grow and will be driven by social, native and video. Display will still dominate -- there's no surprise there -- but the new growth is being driven by these formats that seek to get within the content stream, not just jump out on top of it and scream for attention. 

The takeaway? Well, we all know we're in a mobile-first environment and that what was annoying on the desktop will be even more frustrating on the small screen. So there has always been a question of whether the industry would reform and innovate a better user experience or simply carry on encouraging smartphone owners to install ad blocking software.

The fact that ad blocking is on a plateau and that Zenith is revealing ad growth will come from non-intrusive formats suggests that the mobile marketing industry is mature enough to see its faults. It had tried carrying on with the formats that annoyed us on the big screen, and has realised that doesn't work quite so well. So now it is trying to give us a better experience on the smaller screen. Encouraging news.