• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, June 5, 2024

How often do you read articles on your phone?  Like most people, you probably do it every day.  Maybe you only spend a few minutes on your phone each day, or maybe you’re like the millions of people who log hour after hour on their phone.

I like to read the news at night and check social media in the morning.  In between I may look for the weather, or a recipe to cook for dinner.  I do this on my phone because it’s easy, but I always question that decision when I’m inundated with pop-up ads on the content, and ad after ad is inserted to extend the page and deliver an infinite volume of impressions that are inevitably skipped and ignored.

Online advertising (mostly) fixed its pop-up problem years ago, but mobile may be in a death spiral if the industry doesn’t do something quickly.

Want to see what I mean?  Simply search for any recipe on your phone, or click into almost any piece of content from Apple News.  The page you visit will have what you need, but you will be bombed by as many as 6 different pop-ups or overlays, and as many as (believe it or not) 15 in-page ads as you scroll down to find what you were looking for.

Recipe sites are the worst!  The very bottom of the page has the actual recipe, while the content above it is clearly SEO bait, with paragraph after paragraph reiterating the recipe in various ways, plus ads that get counted as impressions. 

I have never clicked any of those ads and the recall is horrible, demonstrated by the fact I have no idea what they were advertising.  What’s more, some of the ads actually cover other ads, but the OTS, or opportunity to see, them is unphased.

If the ad volume is infinite, and if nobody ever engages with those ads (on purpose), then why are marketers still considering this kind of advertising?

Yes, it is targetable, and the demise of third-party cookies can be circumvented because of other identifiers and tools.  It is viable, because people spend more and more time on their phones each year, and younger generations are still showing signs that mobile usage is increasing.  Yes, mobile is an important vehicle in driving frequency and reaching those who simply don’t use a desktop.

All that being said, can we not acknowledge that the format of these ads is no longer tenable, and that we have to rethink the way these ads are delivered?

I don’t have any horse in this race.  I don’t operate in mobile ads these days.  My focus is in video, and video on a mobile device is clearly still about pre-roll and more.

What about mobile display, though?  Where is the innovation?  Where are the new ideas?  Have we ceded the mobile display landscape to a litany of annoying and ineffective ad formats?  Are we not going to learn from the mistakes of the online display landscape circa 2000-2005?

We need to put guidelines in place that restrict the volume of ads delivered on a mobile-rendered page.  We should discourage, if not remove, pop-ups and overlays on mobile altogether (the real estate is so small already, why block it?).

Maybe an interstitial in mobile is actually a viable alternative?  Maybe there’s something better that we can come up with as an industry?  I would love to know what you folks are working on, so please drop a note in the comments and let us all know!