The New Era of Mobile: What Challenges Will Advertisers Tackle in 2017?

The smartphone has been top-of-mind for years now, yet the innovation still continues.

While this year’s Consumer Electronics Show is packed with devices, it’s clear there’s been a shift away from the mobile device itself, to an infatuation with everything the device can do. Now that consumers are highly accustomed to calling, texting, shopping and surfing on smartphones and tablets, what is the natural next step?

One area that’s still desperate for innovation in 2017 is mobile advertising. This is going to be the year that marketers fully commit to mobile in smarter, more effective ways than ever before.

According to eMarketer data released in September 2016, U.S. mobile internet users are spending 19% of their time on mobile web and a whopping 82% in-app. So when we talk about cross-platform advertising, mobile is no longer just a screen, it’s the screen. It’s become an essential platform for marketers to master in order to deliver engaging brand messages. Yet, the advertising industry has been slow to catch up with mobile technology and its users. Best practices from offline and web have largely been copied and pasted over—often not taking into account the vastly different user experience that mobile offers. This is why many advertisers worry that their ads still aren’t being seen due to rendering problems and/or unqualified clicks.

Brands can take a bruising from these issues, along with the innate real estate constraints and busy screens that are common on mobile.

We put a lot of thought into figuring out how to make advertising work better on mobile—after all, the majority of Pandora’s traffic comes from our mobile app. In order to help our advertisers (and advertisers everywhere!) harness the power of mobile to create one-to-one, intimate experiences between brands and consumers, we need to come together as an industry to accomplish two things:

Rethink Creative: Mobile screens vary in size, but today’s advertising rarely capitalizes on the full “canvas” to make an impact. Mobile creative decisions to-date have been made based on learnings from web. Now we have enough information to tailor an ad experience to what the mobile user actually wants.

Make Quality a Priority: Quality ad units, served in quality environments, targeted to quality audiences lead to one thing, and one thing only: quality clicks. A big challenge of today’s mobile advertising has been the infamous “fat thumb syndrome,” which can lead to unqualified interest for a brand. We can fix this by emphasizing quality in our mobile media plans.

Mobile advertising is growing faster than any other medium, which is why we cannot silently sit back while these issues continue. By taking what we know about mobile and putting quality first, we can collectively raise the bar on mobile impressions. At Pandora, we see this as such a huge opportunity—one that our engineers have been hard at work on, creating a new Visual Ad Experience on Pandora to ensure our advertisers take full advantage of what mobile has to offer.

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If you’d like to learn more about our new Visual Ad Experience:

CLICK HERE

^{Source: eMarketer, September 2016}