AdMob is Proving that Mobile Phone Ads Can Work with the Bubble Generation

It's a conundrum. 

How do you reach the most mobile, connected, optioned, and indifferent consumers in history without interrupting, imposing, or insulting them?   That's the essential riddle of marketing to the Bubble Generation.

As discussed here earlier, the BubbleGen consumer--raised on the Internet, tethered by telephony, and always on the move--is awash in choices, skeptical, and hard to win over.  The last thing they will suffer gladly are advertisements and commercials.  And they have done well to avoid them: they watch little or no TV, don't listen to commercial radio, and are unreached by the dying world of newspapers.  But. they also don't like web-based cacophony either, cleverly eschewing interstitials, pop-ups, pop-unders and fighting vigilantly the evils of spyware.  So, you ask, what advertising will work?

In an effort to look at all the emerging ways to reach the new consumer, I thought it might be interesting to examine a few models within various media.  First up this week, mobile telephone advertising.

While in Europe last week I caught word of a firm having solid success dropping text ads onto mobile phones.  The company, AdMob, is rapidly-growing advertising marketplace for content providers that has already served 250 million mobile phone ads in less than a year since launch.  Wondering how the company was wending its way through the white of BubbleGen rapids, I had a chance to get some smart answers from Russell Buckley, the company's managing director for Europe.

The biggest open question to me was how the company's ads are being received by the testy new consumer.  And the upshot is, pretty well, given the metrics.  AdMob is showing a click-through rate as high as eight percent for some spots, averaging a more than respectable three to four percent.  Why the success given the prevailing advertising animus?

"It's not advertising versus no advertising," says Buckley.  "It's would users like to pay for something, or would they like it free? Since the free model needs to be funded somehow, most kids today are pragmatic enough to realize that advertising, even if not a blessing, is certainly useful when it brings them free stuff."

And that brings up a couple of critical points.  First, free is still the price point of choice for online content, so a non-obtrusive text ad that brings you a fun or useful experience may get a pass.  AdMob has been successful in bringing consumers much desired games, news and information and entertainment funded by the modest ads. 

The second point in AdMob's favor, is that these are the early days of online mobile content, so there is no real order to the content universe, no directory to help the user find new stuff--so the ads effectively do that and that is a real value.  Hooking you up with cool new stuff--for free--is a damn good proposition.  But that won't last.  Looking ahead, the trick for AdMob, and competitors like mFoundry and enpocket, will be to keep ads a friendly presence and a compelling experience.  Remember the mantra--engage. entertain and enlist--the essence of envertising.  As these firms gain pages to feed and the pages gain an audience, the ads could become a nuisance.  It will be vital to provide a new paradigm--something unique to the telephone experience.  Contests tied to geographies.  Freebies linked to specific actions.  You know, clever Burma Shave ads for the information highway.  In the words of Carver Mead, "Listen to the technology," it is trying to tll us something.

Mobile phone advertising well may be the most effective way to reach the Bubble Generation consumer and thus far, AdMob is class of the field.  If they play it right, they have an opportunity to set a high standard for this exciting new industry.

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[Scot Howard]

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