• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, April 5, 2007

What is on the other side of those crappy mobile banner ads? And I do mean crappy. Sorry, but almost all of the banners I see atop WAP pages look like they went through some sort of miniaturization ray. They are hard to read (well, for my aging eyes) and continue to suffer from the poor scaling on most handsets. On my Samsung A920, for instance, standard text overwhelms the banner graphic, which makes the ad seem even more shrunken and unbalanced. I have no idea what if any branding effect is possible in these puny units with their limited messaging, but I am eager to see any post-campaign research on lift and intent.

According to many of the mobile ad networks, click-through rates of 3% and higher are common in these early days. Lack of ad clutter or perhaps novelty explain these unusually strong rates. Or maybe there is just a level of boredom behind WAP browsing that works in an advertiser's favor. On a phone, where everyone knows that the next click could bring a tortuous lag, it is surprising so many people are curious enough to drill into many of these relatively bland and uninformative banners. Increasingly, however, they will find some very interesting landing pages. Just a few months ago, my click-throughs on display ads usually landed me on a barren text page or a coupon. A few advertisers clearly have stepped up their game, especially in the auto and entertainment category.

The Mercedes Benz banner on Car and Driver's site does little more than name its C-Class brand and invite me to click for more. My usual response to such anti-creative is to overlook it. If a nondescript brand name and imperceptible car image is the best the advertiser can do, I figure in that nanosecond of a response window, then how interesting could it get on the other end of a click? In this case, however, the ad lands me on a smart micro-site. Following the good aesthetic sense of Car and Driver's own mobile site, the page leads with a full screen image of the car itself. Like a lot of landing pages I tried lately, there seems to be more text than there should be for the platform. In this case the copy spends two paragraphs telling me the car line is "new." The best parts of the micro-site are the links to a click-to-call number, more images and a sign-up for alerts and MB's Insider program. It seems to me the MB landing page is almost-mobile. The copy is not efficient enough to merit a two-screen scroll, but I like its use of images and the immediate options to connect with the manufacturer. Some kind of dealer locater would seem a logical addition, however. The strongest aspect of the MB landing page is that it works to make both a brand and direct-marketing connection at once.

Probably the worst banner-landing page combo I have seen thus far comes ironically from the most aggressive mobile content sponsor around, Windows Mobile. Microsoft is generously underwriting a number of print brands' first forays onto the platform with six and nine-month sole sponsorship guarantees. Good for them. They should take better advantage of their exclusive position on some WAP sites with richer creative, however. The standard Windows Mobile banner simply offers the product logo with no promotional or messaging enticement. The landing pages are text scrolls of the worst sort - no images, just feature set blah, blah. It's a phone, after all, and the advertiser is trying to illustrate the advantages of their platform. So show the product on a phone, perhaps? The most effective landing pages I am seeing make some use of images, like the Mercedes micro-site above and the film promo below. There is a good reason why wallpapers and ringtones became surprise hits on mobile. The medium is more of an audio and visual platform than we presume because of its limited bandwidth. Oddly enough, I think people have an expectation of richer media on a phone, if only because sound and imagery are just more efficient modes of communication than text, even if both do require more network capacity.

The banner I found for the film "Perfect Strangers" in Sprint Vision's Entertainment section ends up being the most informative lead-in to a landing page, because the targeting and the creative work together. The banner doesn't describe the film at all, but the title's typeface seems to telegraph "thriller." Including the stars' names, HalleBerry and Bruce Willis, along with a text bug about the movie being in theaters next weekend further target the curious filmgoer. But it is the very strong landing page that really pays off in this campaign. We land essentially on a movie poster, that itself is a kind of meaningful wallpaper. Yup, it's a thriller; Halle is looking all doe-eyed and victimized while Bruce is working that signature "what-the-f---?" squint. Is he predator or protector? The creative draws us in by asking a question and offering a "Synopsis" link to answer it.

On each page, whether it is the synopsis or cast bios, image complements text to communicate information efficiently. The image poses questions or suggests a tension that the text answers. The payoff is the video trailer page, although things get dicey here. On my handset the trailer offered cryptic links to "mp4," "_1.3gp," or "3gp (profile0)," and these are the kinds of weird errors that remain too common on mobile. The trailer itself is generally too dark for a small LCD, and I am not sure that the fast-cut conventions of trailers for TV and theater work well on mobile. Still, the entire package has me intrigued enough to consider the product. After all, the plot involves a conspiratorial advertising executive that our heroine suspects of murder, so we know it isn't too fanciful.

I come back from these mobile landing pages impressed again by the potential depth of the platform. The advertisers who give me more multimedia, or at least give the interested mobilista the option to go further, are the ones that leave an imprint. The ones that answer my click with a mere screen of text or a reference to a desktop Web site or 1-800 number are disappointing. It seems counter-intuitive, but a mobile user may be looking for more from a click than a standard Web user. If you are venturing into a promotion on a handset, perhaps you are looking to make a greater investment in time or you are expecting a higher level of engagement than you would from a Web text link or standard promotion. 

It is only from using this medium every day that we start to see the curious ways our media rituals will shake out on mobile. There are still ironies waiting for us here. Smaller could let us go deeper. What seems to be a lesser platform could be asking us to do more.