How to Adapt Ads to Attract Mobile Users

The prospect of this is so beguiling. Keep calm and carry on. Keep doing those ads we did before and get some chimp to wring it through an algorithm thingy and the TVC can be on my Nokia quicker than you can say ‘technological tsunami inbound’.

You could convert gilt-framed photos for Instagram... but should you? As a tired new father, I suspect the only reasons could be you are lazy, stupid or greedy. 

Mobile is a fundamentally-different viewing experience. It is hyper-personal, an extension of ourselves, where we are less accepting of brand interruptions as we pay our bills. We use it in fundamentally different ways, at different times. It’s a lean-in media, where people are more price/data sensitive. It has a relatively tiny screen, obstructed by a chubby thumb, which demands our partial attention constantly.

In recent Gravity Road research, we found the average sedentary adult now scrolls further in a day than they walk in a day! We all know that intuitively. You wake up and first thing you do is scan your feeds to check the world hasn’t ended, the US Presidency hasn’t been ended, and then you start your day. 

This insight, this experience, has really fundamental implications for the production of mobile content. The theme is around its construction. Nobody is hanging. They are giving your film split second consideration and if you’re not giving people a compelling reason to stop now, they are off. This means the idea needs to promise the viewer something they might be interested in and it needs to be tightly-edited upfront. 

The second implication is on production. Wide shots, not so much. The mobile screen works best with tighter shots and close ups. Consider square and vertical video as it will pop in a mobile frame whilst horizontal formats tend to disappear. Consider the implications for the production budgets too as mobile audiences are more forgiving and there is a limit to how luxurious the film needs to be. 

This is an issue for the production community. With the rates of mobile internet usage, with clients’ appetite for ‘mobile first’; be part of the solution. This is a unique opportunity to prove one’s spurs as a creative problem solver and to do, learn and try again.  This is a moment not to repeat what worked in the past, and to respect this new medium and the people who use it. Production needs to come out, depend less on the comfort of commoditised spots and work to find what the new ‘good’ looks like. 

There are businesses who have vested interests in adapting, but I worry the results of this will have mutated so far from how it was originally conceived that it will be no use to anyone. It will piss us all off when it clogs up our mobiles, so in short my answer is don’t.

Start afresh. The opportunity of getting it right is worth it.