Personalization in mobile advertising

The ascent of mobile advertising depends on 2 critical factors: relevance to the customer and ROI to the advertiser. In an age of prevalent data, it is only a matter of time before processes converge to bring value to each component in the mobile advertising space.

The holy grail of advertising is now about conversions. As mentioned in a prior blog post, the low ROI on mobile is causing brands to spend more on direct response vs brand advertising. Companies have begun offering a variety of targeted, direct response campaign tools to brands where they pay per conversion. These conversions can range from click to call campaigns for search campaigns to direct purchase offers based on location and behavioral data.

The more relevant the offer is to the user's intent, the higher the chance of conversion. So how do we effectively map the data we have to bring relevancy to the consumer and a greater ROI to the advertiser? What's important to note is that consumers WANT personalization. Personalization essentially means building a trusted connection with a business where information is shared to provide greater value to the consumer. It ultimately means the creation of loyalty especially when coupled with rewards.

Mobile, unlike TV, is a very fragmented experience for advertisers. To do a mobile ad buy, advertisers have to select between different networks and exchanges and RTB platforms. These ads tend to prompt users to take actions quickly, resulting in more direct-response executions, which have a higher conversion rate if they are tailored to an individual user's particular demographics and location.

According to MMA Chairman Mr. Philbin, there are 3 basic stages of mobile marketing:

• Crawl (send messages to masses)
• Walk (light segmentation)
• Run (advanced segmentation and 1-to-1 marketing)

Philbin says we should focus on connecting the top of the marketing funnel (which includes mobile ad and CRM data integration) with the bottom of the funnel (messaging, post-click engagement, mobile wallet/passbook), thus bringing to life mobile Big Data.

The realization of context and content with personalization holds great potential but time, location and interactions are all necessary to execute this play. Mobile customers tend to have 3-8x the spending of email customers yet mobile ad dollars remain a small fraction of digital spend. As personalization improves, we can expect recipients of mobile ads to become more receptive and engaged.