Want better mobile ads? Use the whole phone

Benjamin Pavanetto’s goal is pretty lofty. “We want to redefine mobile advertising,” he proclaims. "We're trying to make mobile ads more memorable through an enjoyable user experience.”

As Asia-Pacific head of mobile ad platform Adludio, Pavanetto says the region is ripe for changing the landscape with its generation of mobile-first digital natives consuming all their content on small screens.

Key to Adludio's offering is using the existing functionality of smartphones to enhance mobile ad experiences, including gyroscopic, haptic and touch. All the intuitive feelings, movements and vibrations a phone deploys when a consumer interacts with it can, quite simply, be added to the mobile advertising mix.

“When you talk to people about advertising, you may refer to a TV ad you liked, or something you saw at the cinema, but it never comes to mind to talk about mobile ads,” Pavanetto explains.

“It’s mainly because the way brands interact with consumers on mobile, and the way they receive the brand message, is different. You don’t just use sound or silence on mobile, the main sense you trigger is tactile. So why not tap more into this more often?”

Set up in London in 2012, AdLudio launched in Asia last year with a Singapore office. Pavanetto says the fact that the company will open its Hong Kong office later this year indicates that things are moving in the right direction.

Clients in the region include Marriott, Singapore Airlines and Adidas, which Pavanetto is pleased with because it demonstrates that better interactivity in mobile advertising works across all sectors.

On mobile, he says, it’s about quick, meaningful interaction rather than deep engagement, which is why having creative optimised and designed specifically with mobile in mind is critical to success, as is the speed of delivery.

“Instead of trying to create compelling, emotional content like you do on other mediums, why not make it quick – impactful yet intelligent?” Pavanetto proposes. “That’s our approach.”

Directly linked to this engagement, he adds, is the sense that mobile advertising should be enjoyable, not simply a banner that appears over the content you’re trying to access while the little ‘x’ you desperately search for to close it is hidden among the pixels.

“Make mobile ads more fun,” he says, “and it moves the consumer from being passive to being active. [The ad] is also user initiated – someone can choose to close it.”

That element of fun and gamification is a key tenet of AdLudio’s offering – the name means ‘playful’ in Latin – which Pavanetto believes allows more room for creativity. Moreover, the company charges on engagement, which he says “guarantees 100% viewability by definition”. 

“Everybody is doing the things they think are best, but obviously we can do better,” he says. “Maybe we [as an industry] need to be more ambitious on the mobile creative front.”