How Native Advertising Is Reshaping the Smartphone Experience

How Native Advertising Is Reshaping the Smartphone Experience

You only need to walk down a busy street filled with people immersing themselves with media on their smartphone to see that the profitable future of digital publishing is with mobile. If you’ve been trying to get by with presenting the same print or desktop experience to your mobile readers, it will not take you long to realize that you are doing them as well as your advertisers and your own company a disservice. 

The advertisements in a magazine’s print replica edition are definitely not optimized for the small tactile screens used by mobile users. In fact, with so many publishers forgetting to take the unique user experience of mobile readers into account when planning their content (let alone advertising!) strategy, readers will often back out of the mobile site before you even have the chance to make an impression on them. Research shows that an eye-opening 57% of mobile users will abandon your website if it takes more than just 3 seconds to load, and as anyone who has ever tried to overcome a bad mobile layout will be able to tell you, the lasting impression that that can have on a user can spell disaster for your mobile edition.

In order to reap success in the mobile market, it is important for publishers to embrace a mobile-first strategy for their content, which should extend as well to include your advertising.  Native advertising has been hailed to take over as the new frontier in mobile advertising, with its potential to engage readers surpassing that of traditional print ads.

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What Is Native Advertising and Why Is it Suited to the Mobile Platform?

Updating your mobile ad strategy with a mobile-responsive approach in mind will give your advertisers options that they cannot take advantage of in your print or in desktop editions. Native advertising consists of paid material that is formatted specifically for mobile devices. This includes better options for sizing (you no longer need to stay within the size and shape of a print page present your ad).
Why Mobile Native Ads Are More Effective and User-Friendly than Traditional Display or Banner Ads

Traditional banner and display ads can very easily miss their mark if not created with the mobile platform and mobile experience in mind. Today’s mobile reader wants value from their content, so ads that fail to offer them this will be quickly passed over. On the flip side, ads which do not fit the form and function of the mobile space will often stick out on the screen like a sore thumb, and result in a poor user experience and an increase in reader drop off rates. Mobile native ads address both of these issues by adapting to not only the design and format of your mobile edition, but also the type of content you put forward. Strong native ads in mobile responsive magazines will often present themselves as similar to editorial content, offering readers more value than they would have as a limited print ad.
How Responsive Mobile Native Ads Can Be Leveraged To Create New Ad Revenue

Your advertisers will want to take advantage of your growing potential of your mobile audience and the enhanced functionality of native advertisements. For example, each ad can be an interactive experience. An advertiser can provide an ad that works like a small website page in your publication.

Native ads also can also incorporate an SMS option, such as telling the reader to text a keyword mentioned in the ad to get a response like a coupon code sent back via return SMS. The immediacy, ease, and marketing potential afforded by this feature allows you to rise above the limitations imposed by simply maintaining a print or desktop ad strategy, and will put you in a position to upsell these desirable features to your advertisers or sponsors.

Do not forget to point out the advantages of incorporating other mobile native features into your ads, such as adding a tap-to-call or tap-for-directions button at the end of your native ads to make it even easier and much more user-friendly for readers to engage with your advertisers’ brands.

As advertisers become more and more familiar with the benefits of reaching out to consumers with native mobile advertising, the pressure will increase on publishers who still rely solely on print or desktop to distribute materials. To help you get started, Realview has launched an innovative new mobile-first publishing solution that makes it easier than ever for you to take your PDF content and transform it into a responsive HTML5 format for smartphone. The benefits to readers, advertisers and your publishing business will become clear once you test the system yourself. Click through to find out more about how you can take your content mobile.