Motion Ads: A New Mobile Ad Unit to Change the Game?

I’ve often said that the greatest limitation we have in mobile advertising is still the ad unit.

User experience has a long way to go on mobile devices, and we are just barely learning how we best operate with these little pocket brains constantly at our side.

What is a great user experience on mobile?

It has clearly not be defined. One of the early success this year came from Facebook with their Mobile App Install Ads unit. As you would imagine, Facebook did quite a lot of testing before hand, but no one could have known how successful this unit would really be. And then, there was the sliding tile. Genious. For some silly reason, users love to flip through those slides of ads even if they don’t recognize or need any thing they see. It is just a need to swipe, to make an impact on the screen (kinda reminds you of the Tinder interface, no?).

The rest of the app ecosystem continues to fight feverishly looking for new ad unit possibilities, and this company, Adtile, might be on to something. Take a look at this video.

I love the interaction, but I’m not sure how effective it will really be. I’m especially uncertain that this will do well with performance or direct response oriented campaigns unless the sophistication is improved quite a bit. However, I suppose these ads are not so dissimilar to those that allow users to play a preview of a game within the ad unit, but the “game play” in those is far more interactive.

Without results, I can’t comment too much more one the validity of this ad unit. Anyone else have experience with it yet? Any results you would care to share?

What do you think?

Are these ads revolutionary?

Could they be a template or style that will change the way we advertise on smart phones?

Author

A digital marketer by background, Peter is the former CEO of TUNE, the enterprise platform for partner marketing. In 2018, he sold TUNE’s mobile measurement product to Branch, unifying measurement and user experience. He led TUNE’s efforts to bring better management technology and automation to marketing partnerships, across affiliates, influencers, networks, and business development relationships. Follow @peterhamilton