Emerging Trend: Mobile Video Advertising In The Age Of 3G

Mobile devices are fast becoming the place where numerous technologies converge, thus creating useful services and applications for consumers and enterprise-level customers. With the growing rise in smartphones and Internet video services and consumption, it can be easily said that mobile video has been largely adopted all across the globe.

Improving economic conditions and the relatively cheaper costs of handsets and mobile network connections are the driving forces behind the wide-scale adoption of mobiles and 3G users. Even though there are lots of Indians who are still into feature phones, statistics and reports reveal time and again that the pace of smartphone adoption is picking up drastically. India already has around 50-60 million 3G users. This, I think, is the peek point in mobile advertising.

3G connectivity and powerful handsets are driving brands into engaging in mobile marketing. India now boasts of being Asia’s largest mobile ad impression market. Businesses and brands, therefore, need to acknowledge the potential of the mobile video platform. Mobile Video-ads can effectively deliver brand-specific content. Time to redirect your interest towards Mobile Advertising as well!

In the time ahead, companies and enterprises will power various innovations with video in order to engage and serve the needs of mobile users. Through Mobile video advertising, brands can enable users to download brand apps, interact with sites or even offer the targeted audience with contextual video advertising. Brands and marketers can have clickable icons such as ‘Email advertiser’, ‘Contact Advertiser’ which focus on user-interactivity without actually interrupting the user’s view experience.

Mobile video ads essentially enable the companies to outreach their marketing scope. This will help increase sales with full accountability. As for the app developers, they earn multiple times than what could be earned from typical display advertising.

In order to explain how Mobile Video advertising delivers, let me take up a case in point. Suppose an enterprise in the online travel domain decides to open up exclusive travel schemes for its Indian-origin USA customers. Also, the offer is only for a limited time period. So how does the company extend its marketing? Ans:  Mobile Video advertising.

This format allows companies to develop pre-app video solutions or ads to sync with the company’s schemes and marketing plans. The format allows the smartphone users to respond to the marketer’s video ads by forms of interaction, either through Email or even calling. In this scenario, smartphone users could be served with 5-10 second video ads while waiting for the selected mobile application to begin.

With such types of marketing platforms emerging, what could be the roadmap for the mobile advertising industry?  Here are a few thoughts.

Firstly, mobile ads will continue to get more concerned with user-engagement and facilitate rich levels of one-on-one interactions between the brand and the consumers. Live streaming itself enables highly-contextual video ads based on specific collated data and keywords. Another segment in which this industry can innovate is the way in which mobile video ad content is presented to users. Currently, the competing mobile platforms include iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. Frankly, the video solutions of none of these platforms are compatible. Flash, the ultimate video standard for computing devices, might not be available on most smartphones. Plus, Adobe has also discontinued updating Flash for the Android platform. What the mobile video advertising industry requires is an all-platform compatible video solution,  preferably based on HTML5-‘create once, run anywhere.’ This innovation could make mobile video ads easy to implement and provide an unparalleled unified video ad experience across any device.

I’m confident about seeing innovations in the industry very soon which will let marketers truly maximize the Mobile Video ad opportunity.

Image Courtesy |  shutterstock

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