How to Serve Up Value With Mobile Content Marketing (contentmarketinginstitute.com)

Mobile content marketing efforts can be a bit like dancing a cha-cha on the lip of a volcano. The problem is mobile’s greatest asset is also its vulnerability. Most mobile devices are personal, so they offer marketers a breathtakingly rich source of data from geotracking and social media accounts. Manage it gracefully, and you can tap your customers’ most ardent interests — even before they are consciously aware of them. Overstep, and expect instant payback.

Some of our favorite mobile plays in the B2C space over the last few years manage to toe the line carefully, offering value in exchange for access and carefully keeping clear of overly promotional or self-serving content. 

Whole Foods 

Whole Foods makes its digital marketing approach work without consistent online retail, as not every physical Whole Foods location offers an online shop. Whole Foods enhances its in-store experience with the help of mobile commerce provider Digby. Through the Whole Foods app, shoppers can scan barcodes and access rich information about the product (such as provenance and reviews), activate QR codes, and virtually check in at stores. Whole Foods uses the information to build a behavior profile, then serves up relevant deals in real time while shoppers are in the store.

“This is a countdown discount”

Meat Pack

Guatemalan shoe store chain Meat Pack uses a similar approach for its mobile content marketing efforts, but takes it to a brilliant extreme. Saatchi & Saatchi Guatemala developed an enhancement to the Meat Pack app called Hijack. Using GPS data, Hijack sends a push notification when it detects that a customer is browsing a Meat Pack competitor’s store. The message offers a 99 percent discount for the same shoes in the local Meat Pack branch — but the moment the customer looks at the message the discount starts counting down 1 percent at a time. The faster the customer can make it to the store the greater the discount.

Delta Air Lines 

Delta Air Lines found a way to leverage its customers’ cravings for information about an area that’s usually off-limits — the baggage journey — by offering a baggage tracker as part of its Fly Delta app. To promote the baggage tracker feature, Wieden+Kennedy created a simple film that peeked behind the plastic flaps on the conveyor belt by rigging a suitcase with six cameras and sending it from Atlanta to New York. The journey was hosted on YouTube and viewed more than 1.5 million times. More importantly, it spurred a 60 percent increase in downloads the month after launch and a 50 percent increase the following month (the app is now used an average of 8,000 times daily).

 

Heineken

Some of the best mobile content marketing plays provide something to do or know in situations where customers previously felt passive. In 2011, Heineken launched a fantastic, soccer-themed app to that end. Research showed most fans watched Union of European Football Associations games at home alone, often watching games that did not feature their own favorite team. Heineken’s Star Player app lets users quickly set up a gaming account, and as soon as the whistle blows, the action on the viewer’s second screen syncs to the game. Throughout the game, the player is given eight tries to accurately predict whether either team will score within the next 30 seconds. A correct guess wins big points, with the first to take the plunge scoring more highly than those who call it closer to the goal time. Free kicks or corners result in a quick decision-making prompt, with each outcome — goal, miss, save, clear — offering a score in proportion to the likelihood of that outcome.

 

Budweiser

Fantastic mobile content experiences can also play off existing apps on the market. For example, to promote its Made in America festival, Budweiser collaborated with Bonfyre (a photo-sharing and group-texting app) to share relevant, branded images with the Bonfyre group set up for the event. According to Budweiser, the strategy resulted in re-shares to almost 100,000 friends and followers outside the actual event.

Bitcoin: The Future of Currency? (mobilepaymentstoday.com)

Bitcoin has taken some hits in the mainstream media the past six months, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a bank industry executive not talking about the cryptocurrency’s threat to legacy payments systems once they understand how it works.

The infographic below, sponsored by Jumio and Bitcoin Identity Security Open Network (BISON), explains some of Bitcoin’s basic elements, including how to use it and some finer points about its volatile nature.

In a nutshell, Bitcoin was created to eliminate the middleman when two parties exchange payment for goods and services. No banks and third-party networks such as Visa or MasterCard are involved in the payment process. And the transaction is almost completely anonymous.

At the moment, some 12,450,000 bitcoins are in circulation at a value of roughly $6.5 billion. Bitcoin’s value fluctuates daily. A whole bitcoin was worth $1,104 at one point in the last five months.

Some have compared the current state of Bitcoin to where the Internet was in 1994 or 1995, so it should come as no surprise people like Marc Andreessen of Netscape fame and more contemporary investors such as the Winklevoss twins are jumping on the bandwagon now. 

Bitcoin: The Future of Currency? [infographic]

10 mobile marketing statistics to help justify your budget (thenextweb.com)

Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, a professional speaker and freelance writer. This post originally appeared on the Adknowledge blog.

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Many marketers have experienced it: presenting a case to superiors for a larger budget or defending how they spent the existing budget.

At times, it can be a difficult process with lots of push back and discussion, while other times it’s an easy conversation due to the success of your spending decisions or widespread internal buy-in.

Either way, budget management is a critical aspect of your role as a marketer, or soon will be at one point in your career. Your marketing budget should be informed and defended with facts and figures to support the channels you wish to market your organization on and why.

Mobile, as a marketing channel, can no longer be ignored and must be addressed in order to succeed.

A mobile-first advertising strategy is already in place by many companies looking to reach their customers where they’re actually active. Whether you’re focused on Facebook advertising, banner ads, marketing your mobile app or looking to drive greater brand awareness on multiple mobile channels, it’s important that a portion of your advertising spend is allocated to mobile marketing.

Start now, before your business gets left behind, as many of your competitors already have active mobile advertising campaigns in motion.

To accomplish this goal and defend your decision to apply some of your spend to mobile marketing, use these statistics to support your budget allocations.

1. Spending on mobile advertising will grow substantially year-over-year across industries

In 2014, mobile advertising is expected to grow 75.1 percent to $31.45 billion, which makes up nearly one-quarter of total digital ad spending worldwide.

According to eMarketer, Google and Facebook are responsible for a majority of this growth in mobile ad spend. Both companies saw their net mobile ad revenue increase by $6.92 billion in 2013.

Takeaway:

This is a strong indication that organizations allocating marketing spends to mobile-focused channels are seeing a strong ROI from their efforts.

Although these statistics are predictions, they rely heavily on the explosive growth of advertising dollars regularly being allocated to mobile channels.

This most likely indicates that these channels are working for these businesses to drive measurable results or they wouldn’t continue to allocate their budgets to them.

Mobile ad spending will continue to grow as advertising platforms like Facebook begin to expand offerings to suit the needs of advertisers like adding call-to-action buttons to their ads and the other constant improvements to both ad units and tools.

2. Consumers are less likely to comparison shop when using a mobile app

According to comScore, 46 percentof shoppers say they are less likely to shop around for other options when they’re using a company’s mobile app. This data was compiled from a survey of more than 3,000 U.S. online shoppers that asked them questions about their shopping behavior.

Takeaway:

It is time to begin either spending advertising dollars on driving more installs of your mobile app or developing a mobile app to begin with. Consumers are less likely to abandon a shopping experience on your mobile app as they are on a mobile website.

It’s recommended that you drive mobile traffic to your app to decrease the likelihood that your customers will shop your competitor’s products and services.

Focus your spend on the development of a mobile app or driving traffic to an existing app using mobile app install ads on Facebook, through the new Twitter app card ads or elsewhere on mobile.

3. More than half of consumer time spent on the Internet is on mobile devices

Consumers today spend nearly 60 percent of their time on the Internet on their mobile devices, as compared to their desktop or laptop computer, tablet and other devices.

Takeaway:

There is no reason why your business should not be focusing at least half of its advertising spend on mobile channels because that’s where your audience is active online today.

It’s important to measure the ROI of your mobile marketing through lifetime value, or LTV, since there are typically many touch points when a customer converts on a mobile device and this must be taken into consideration when understanding the cost of conversions as part of your budget.

The LTV of consumers is important to consider, especially with mobile, since they may interact with your business on one channel, but not yet convert until interacting with your business twice more on other channels until they convert a few weeks later.

In other circumstances, a one-time shopper can become a lifelong customer by simply being re-engaged on mobile in the future.

Since consumers are using mobile more extensively today, it’s important to understand the LTV each customer can bring to your business if properly reached with the right messaging on the mobile channels where they’re most active.

4. The growing intersection of mobile and the retail experience becomes a bigger priority

Alex and Ani, a lifestyle and accessories brand, improved sales by 318 percent with a mobile point-of-sale (POS) system. The mobile POS system allowed store associates at Alex and Ani retail locations to use iPod Touches to checkout customers.

Instead of having three POS terminals at a store location, they are able to checkout customers at 25 locations throughout their stores using a mobile device operated by store associates.

Takeaway:

Your mobile marketing can potentially affect the success of your brick-and-mortar stores offline, creating a cohesive and enjoyable experience for your customers.

Allocating your marketing budget on mobile can help generate value and utility for your customers online and in-person, which can lead to increased sales, customer engagement and a stronger LTV from your customer base.

5. Mobile traffic will grow significantly in the next five years with no end in sight

According to the Ericsson Mobility report, growth in mobile data traffic between 2013 and 2019 will grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 45 percent.

With these calculations in mind, it’s estimated there will be 10 times the amount of total mobile data traffic by 2019.

Takeaway:

Companies of all sizes have no choice but to start advertising and building an active community on mobile in order to remain relevant and engaged with their customers.

If you aren’t quickly moving to create an active presence on mobile, your competitors will likely outpace you in the coming months and years with their existing mobile campaigns as your business tries to catch up with the market and its explosive growth.

6. Video will continue to represent a majority of activity occurring on mobile devices

By 2018, mobile video will represent 69 percent of all mobile traffic, which is an increase from 53 percent in 2013. Last year, users watched about two hours of video per month on their mobile phones.

Takeaway:

The question many businesses ask when tasked with using mobile to market themselves is What should I actually be doing on mobile to market my company effectively? One of the best answers is advertising with video in a variety of ways.

Video advertising on mobile is a must in order to capture the attention of a majority of users using mobile devices, whether through pre-roll ads, branded video content or the effective distribution of video content with the right publishers.

With the right strategy, mobile video has a strong ROI that can produce results in the long-term for your organization. It’s all about creating and distributing video content with a goal of longevity as opposed to focusing too heavily on virality.

Video should already be a significant part of your marketing mix today, if not, here’s more on the value of video for your content marketing strategy.

Video is a viable option for marketers to reach their audiences, especially at the scale of mobile, since it caters to the different consumption patterns of users, it develops messaging that can meet the unique nuances of various platforms, it can add an additional revenue stream for your business and can help build a long-term relationship with your customers.

7. Facebook mobile users continue to exceed Facebook desktop users

Facebook recently reported that it has one billion monthly active users on its mobile apps, as well as 200 million monthly active users on Instagram.

Takeaway:

With Facebook’s large network of all types of users, as well as comprehensive targeting capabilities to reach them, it’s a no brainer that it will continue to be a powerful channel for reaching your customer base on mobile.

Facebook saw a major boost in advertising revenue from mobile app install ads, since it is working effectively at driving users to the mobile apps of organizations that have difficulty achieving visibility in the app stores.

Facebook also introduced mobile app ads that encourage Facebook users to revisit downloaded apps, which has helped to increase engagement with many organization’s app offerings.

Take into consideration the unique targeting capabilities Facebook offers for reaching the right persona on their mobile phone, based on their past interactions with your website or similarities to your existing customers.

8. Redeeming mobile coupons is on the rise

In 2014, one in four mobile phone users will redeem a coupon via a mobile device. According to eMarketer estimates, the number of smartphone coupon users rose by 66 percent in 2012 and continues to rise year over year.

Takeaway:

Increased mobile phone usage has made claiming coupons and offers on-the-go more convenient for consumers looking for deals from their favorite brands. It’s a prime opportunity to reach your customer base while they’re shopping online for your offerings, or similar products from competitors.

One of the best opportunities mobile coupons provide for your business is presenting them to customers as they shop your brick and mortar stores in person. They are already visiting your business, which makes it a prime opportunity to incentivize them to make a purchase.

Finally, advertising your coupons, deals and offers on mobile devices is still an extremely new method of marketing to your customer. Therefore, there is far less struggle with competitors to reach your audience with mobile coupons and as a result, an opportunity to achieve greater visibility with your campaigns.

9. Twitter was born on mobile and continues to offer opportunities for growth on these devices

According to Twitter, 76 percent of Twitter users login via mobile devices. To date, Twitter users are sharing 500 millions tweets per day.

Takeaway:

This means that advertisers should focus a majority of their spend on Twitter ads on mobile as opposed to desktop. It is important to allocate a spend for both desktop and mobile, but place more of your spend on Twitter mobile ads and continue to adjust throughout the duration of the campaign.

According to the Wall Street Journal, conversion costs can vary widely on Twitter, depending on the vertical and your optimization efforts. Take this cost-per-conversion into consideration when segmenting your advertising budget and applying it to each mobile marketing channel.

With proper management and integration with the Twitter ads API across existing advertising channels, businesses are able to actually measure the impact of their monthly Twitter advertising campaigns.

10. A majority of mobile searches result in immediate action

According to iAcquire, 70 percent of mobile searches lead to action on a website within one hour of when the search was conducted. The study suggests that mobile users doing searches are more motivated to take immediate action than someone searching from a desktop or laptop computer.

Takeaway:

First and foremost, this statistic stresses how important it is for your organization to have a mobile-friendly website to ensure a person is able to take an appropriate action with your business.

If a mobile phone user is visiting your website to find the location of your stores and your website isn’t mobile-friendly, your business could be missing out on attracting potential customers.

Second, this speaks to the effectiveness of mobile advertising at helping to drive awareness, app downloads, increase purchases and more since the intent of a user to perform an action is much stronger.

There are fewer distractions on a mobile screen, therefore certain actions taken on a mobile device get more attention from a mobile user than they would on a desktop or laptop.

As an advertiser, there are many opportunities to gain the attention of a potential customer with such a small screen, fewer opportunities for distractions and a stronger intent, whether from a pre-roll ad on a YouTube video or an in-feed ad in their favorite publication.

A Guide To Mobile Native Ads (mobyaffiliates.com)

Since the beginning of the smartphone boom publishers and advertisers have been crying out for more sophisticated mobile ad formats. The almighty mobile banner ad has long been the bane of the industry,generating unreliable clicks and marring apps with detached, and ugly, designs. Facebook and Twitter showed the way a few years ago, with promoted tweets and app install ads, and now it looks like the dam has finally busted for the rest of the industry.

Six months into 2014 and we’ve already seen a range of ad companies, social networks and media giants announce new mobile native ad products, from AOL to Yahoo, and from Twitter to Pinterest. Native has rapidly gone from being a buzzword to a new industry standard, and while not everyone agrees on the exact nature of ‘native,’ it’s good to see all the talk finally giving way to lots of action.

With all these announcements it’s understandable that some people will have trouble keeping up. So we’ve decided it’s time take a step back and assess the key mobile native ad solutions that have been announced over the last six months and break down what they offer to publishers and advertisers. When we refer to “mobile native ads” we’re talking specifically about mobile ad formats that are designed to blend into, and mimic the look and feel, of the publisher’s app or mobile site.

Contents

• Twitter
• InMobi
• Appsfire
• NativeX
• Facebook
• Mobfox
• LeadBolt
• Yahoo
• AOL
• Namo Media
• OpenX

Guide To Mobile Native Ads

Twitter/MoPub

Twitter has been offering promoted tweets for some time now, which are arguably native ads, but this year it made public the fruits of its tie-up with ad network MoPub, by launching its mobile native ad exchange. The exchange takes MoPub’s exchange, which reached over one billion mobile users, and skews it from a traditional/banner focused network to one more aligned with native. The move is somewhat of an affirmation of the RTB model in the face of fears that the scale of programmatic buying would be incompatible with the tailored nature of native formats.

MoPub/Twitter’s native ad SDK lets developers create a customised native ad unit inside their app. The exchange then lets demand partners bid on the native ad inventory. MoPub says publishers have all the control and features present in MoPub’s ad serving platform, including powerful targeting options, frequency capping, creative management and more.

When it comes to Twitter’s efficiency for app marketers, more important is the value of traffic. Indeed, many questions remain over the effectiveness of Twitter’s new products and the ability of the company to deliver valuable users is an open question according to some. The MoPub exchange perhaps holds more potential for advertisers, but Twitter’s announcement was somewhat overshadowed a few weeks later by the reveal of the Facebook Audience Network, which pretty much does the same thing.

Twitter app install ads

Along with MoPub’s new exchange, Twitter also announced its own mobile native app install ad for its social network. It’s a clear attempt to muscle-in on Facebook’s lucrative app promotion business. As you can see above, the ad looks nice, clean and integrated into the experience.

MoPub native ads

Above is an example of Twitter’s solution working with the Flipboard app. It looks slick – with the ad transition animation appearing to follow the Flipboard app – but when it comes to the ad itself, well, you could say it simply looks like a slick banner and interstitial.

InMobi

InMobi rolled out its native ad platform a while ago but only took it out of beta earlier this month. We previously spoke to co-founder Abhay Singhal who said his solution would be a “complete game changer” for the mobile ad industry. InMobi says the core of its platform is the ability for developers of all sizes to create highly customised mobile native ads and it’s goal is to give devs on a smaller budget the ability to create ads that don’t “negatively impact the user experience.” InMobi’s solution certainly looks on track to address the issue of scale when it comes to native.

InMobi offers two ad types: Native Interstitials and Native Content Ads.

Native Interstitials

InMobi’s Native Interstitials are basically interstitial ads that can be customised with different frames that sit around the advertisement. InMobi offers a selection of pre-made frames for developers to use and lets you create your own frames. Of course, whether the pre-made frames can really adapt well to a wide variety of app styles is an open question.

Native Content Ads

InMobi’s Content Ads are content feed ad units, which look very clean and flexible. InMobi lets developers choose from a number of templates, including content walls, news feeds, chat lists for social apps and in-stream.

Appsfire

Appsfire previously ran a popular app discovery platform but the end of last year announced its plans to focus entirely on developing new native ad formats. The start-up has been busy over the last few months, rolling out three new units in total and peppering them with some very innovative design touches.

Ura Maki

The Ura Maki format looks something like a slick re-imagined interstitial and makes innovative use of iOS gestures, and UI features, that everyone is familiar with. Users can either stop the ad before it displays, or swipe up to dismiss after it displays.

Sashimi

Appsfire’s second ‘Sashimi’ unit is basically an in-stream ad and can be deployed across any app that features a content feed. The ad is auto-generated and can be tweaked with a set of customisable templates.

Udon Noodle

The Udon Noodle unit is a little bit more unique compared to the first two and makes use of the blank space in content feeds when users pull down to refresh. While not everyone may like the idea of ad messages  in every nook and cranny of their app, Udon is a great example of thinking outside the box and shows there’s still plenty of room for innovation when it comes to mobile ads.

NativeX

NativeX has been a real pioneer in the native ad space, setting-up the first and only native ad exchange aimed exclusively at mobile games. The Minnesota-based company, which was formally known as W3i, has created a whole range of rich native formats, which have been designed to appeal to gamers and meet the needs of game advertisers. This is complemented by its NativeX Platform, which uses a predictive analytics engine to optimise ad placement and deliver higher returns. Here’s a look at NativeX’s ad units.

Native Interstitials

As we’ve seen with other examples, NativeX updates the traditional interstitial format by letting publishers customise the ad’s boarders with designs that reflect their app.

Native Banner

NativeX’s banners can be customised to match a game’s art style and UI. The banner expands to a full screen ad when clicked. This expanded ad can feature a video.

Native Rich Media

With its focus on games, NativeX has been wise to focus on rich media ads. Publishers can create animations, character interactions, and complete mini-games, which match the aesthetic of their app.

Facebook

Facebook has been among the most successful pioneers of mobile native ads, with its in-stream app install units, which have boosted the fortunes of many apps. A few weeks ago the company launched its Facebook Audience Network, which brings the company’s expertise in native mobile ads to third party publishers.

As we’ve been told many times, bigger app advertisers – games devs in particular – have been desperate for more Facebook inventory. The main driver of demand has been the quality of the social network’s users, which are delivered at a premium price. Whether FAN can deliver the same quality traffic remains to be seen. Nevertheless, Facebook’s ad targeting capabilities plays a big role here and the social network is hoping to replicate this with FAN

The other clear appeal of FAN is that publishers get to piggy back off Facebook’s successful app install ad business and incorporate native ads into their apps relatively simply, working within Facebook’s proven framework.

Facebook native units

Facebook lets developers customise native ads to best fit their apps. The social network has issued a range of guidelines for native units, and shown off a few examples such as the one above. The in-stream format looks similar to Facebook’s own native ads, but there’s more emphasis on the image and it doesn’t look like Facebook is adding other elements, such as the star ratings and info on the number of people using the advertised app.

MobFox

Earlier in the month MobFox announced the first native ad platform dedicated to mobile sites. The Vienna-based network says it’s also the first to offer both a Demand Side Platform and a Supply Side Platform for native. MobFox CEO Julian Zehetmayr told us that despite all the big players jumping into native ads, independents like MobFox will always be in-demand to help publishers distribute traffic across different demand sources. Nearly all the announcements this year have focused on in-app advertisements, so it’s refreshing to see someone bring the mobile web back into the equation.

LeadBolt

Ad network LeadBolt has been pioneering native ads for some time now and has a range of units for advertisers to choose from. A couple of months back, LeadBolt’s CEO Dale Carr told us that his company will continue to experiment with native ads, saying the format represents a huge opportunity for developers and is a natural evolution of mobile advertising.

LeadBolt’s formats fall into three main categories; Interstitial Frames, Floating Ads, and Buttons.

Interstitial Frames

As the name suggests Interstitial Frames are simply customised frames for interstitial ads that mimic the look and feel of an app. LeadBolt tells us these are the most popular native ad types on its network.

Floating Ads

Floating Ads are bit more unique and consist of icons that float across the screen. Users then tap the floating ads to reveal the advertising message. LeadBolt allows publishers to customise the icons to fit better with their app, so you could have a sci-fi app that uses UFOs to carry the ad message, or a travel app that uses airplanes. The blend of interactivity and native is a really innovative way to drive engagment and a good option for game publishers.

More Games Button

At the more basic end of the scale are Leadbolt’s ‘More Games’ buttons. These are ads that are integrated into a game’s menu system, when the player clicks on the button they are taken through to an app wall advertisement. Simple but effective – although perhaps not clearly enough labelled as an ad.

Yahoo

Yahoo announced its native ad product earlier this month and offers three distinct units. Yahoo says its decision to run with its own native ad formats is due to mobile accounting for half of its global monthly active users. The company is also suffering from declining ad revenue, which was down 11% in Q1 2013, so it’s no wonder Yahoo is eyeing-up Facebook’s lucrative approach to install ads, with its own in-stream  units.

Interestingly, Yahoo’s native ad announcement also kicked off a debate over how to properly label native units. Start-up Appsfire took a swipe at the company, saying Yahoo’s adwere not properly demarcating the boundaries between ad and non-ad content. Here’s what Yahoo has revealed so far.

In stream

As with AOL, Yahoo has followed the in-stream native ad format, with units that blend into users’ Yahoo News feeds. The ads are very much integrated into the news feed, with a circled S symbol marking it out as an ad.

In article

The company also revealed a slightly more unique native ad unit that is very image-focused and pops up in paragraph breaks within the articles themselves. The image and the text certainly do a good job of appearing integrated with the content, and basically looks like part of the article.

Photo album

Finally Yahoo is also putting native ads within its mobile photo albums. It’s a smart move and looks very slick. But again, is there enough to mark this out as an ad?

AOL

AOL launched its new mobile native ad product, aimed at app marketers, just last month. The new format consists of a sponsored in-stream ad unit and to our knowledge AOL hasn’t announced anything else. AOL says the benefit of its solution is that app advertisers don’t have to customise their ads for different publishers, they can just supply one image, some text, and can run the ad across all of AOL’s mobile properties, including Huffington Post, engadget, AOL Mail and DailyFinance. AOL says it’s also testing the ad units with third party publishers.

It will be interesting to see how a media company like AOL will expand its mobile native ad offering beyond app install ads. The company says it’s got big brands signed-up but hasn’t revealed what brand campaigns will look like – and there’s much discussion over the value of native ads beyond app installs.

AOL’s app install ad

The above unit is an example of an app install ad on the Huffington Post mobile site. There’s not much emphasis on the image and the ad certainly looks less flashy than some of the other in-stream units out there. But perhaps that’s largely down to the UI of the app itself.

Namo Media

Namo Media was set-up over a year ago by ex-Google employee Gabor Cselle. Earlier this year the company made a few important tweaks to its native ad product, which is entirely focused on content stream ads.

The first change was to allow publishers to adjust the placement of ads in their content streams via a simple web-interface, rather than having to hard-code the placement and submit a new version of the app. Most recently, Namo followed Facebook’s lead and brought ad carousels to its native ads, letting users swipe through multiple ads in a single placement.

Namo Media in-stream app instal ad

Namo gives developers a number of templates to tweak and customise. As you can see above their native app install ad follows the Facebook model and looks nice and clean. But as with some other in-stream ads we’ve seen, perhaps it doesn’t disclose it’s nature to users as clearly as it should.

OpenX

At the beginning of the year OpenX Technologies unveiled its mobile native ad exchange, during the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. OpenX says its new RTB platform offers partners “a seamless multiscreen experience at scale, which is what they need.”

OpenX’s in-stream ads

The native ad formats include content stream ads and rich media ads that “don’t jar the user experience” and are “part of the content flow.” Of course, the big question hovering over RTB native ad platforms such as MoPub, Nativo and OpenX’s, is just how integrated native ads can get on such large scales, and the impact this trend may have on apps themselves, especially when you delve beyond in-stream units.

Wrap up

So native ads are finally taking off in a big way. It’s certainly great news, as everyone – from advertisers to users – agree that previously ad formats (and banners in particular) just don’t cut the mustard. If mobile is going to attract big brand campaigns, and if app marketers want more valuable users, then the ads themselves will have to deliver a better experience than they have been doing up until now. Big questions to look out for include the degree of compatibility between RTB and native formats, native beyond app install, and the friction between providing integrated ads and clearly labelled ads.