20 ideas for Rich Media Mobile Ads

Using Rich media mobile ads as part of a digital cam­paign is stead­ily becom­ing a key strategy. These types of ads are up to four times as effect­ive as stand­ard ban­ner ads in terms of click­through rate, accord­ing to a report from Opera Medi­aworks. How­ever cre­at­ing rich media ads on mobile devices is much more com­plic­ated that cre­at­ing flash based rich media that has be pre­val­ent on desktop com­puters for many years. Even though we now have ways to serve rich media there can often be a lot of browser dis­crep­an­cies and code con­flicts on the sites that serve the ads. This is why many brands and agen­cies are rely­ing on ad plat­forms to make the whole pro­cess much simpler.

In our opin­ion the the best tool for deliv­er­ing Rich Media for mobile plat­forms is Cel­tra. They have an excel­lent an “AdCre­ator” cre­ation plat­form and track­ing. How­ever there are many other excit­ing ideas from other ad plat­forms includ­ing Amo­bee, Air­push, Google Doublel­click andSmartad­server.

Here are some ideas for Rich Media Mobile Ads all of which are now ready to use via the vari­ous ad serving platforms.

3D

Amo­bee have a 3D Ad plat­form where ele­ments can can be rotated in real time whilst tilt­ing the mobile device. This is is a great way of show­cas­ing products.

ANIM­A­TION
This is an obvi­ous one. How­ever tools like AdCre­ator and Google Web­Designer allow us to now cre­ate rich anim­a­tion in mobile ads in a sim­ilar way to Flash. This means that recently pro­duc­tion time for anim­ated mobile ads has been greatly reduced.

AUG­MEN­TED REALITY

Using a mobile device and a prin­ted magazine you can cre­ate some inter­est­ing ads. The example below is taken from a cam­paign cre­ated for eBay on the Amo­bee plat­form. Users hover over cer­tain images in the magazine to reveal extra content.

TWEET A BRAND MES­SAGE
For this idea a pre-populated list of tweets appear in the ad. The users then taps on which tweet they want to send, this integ­rates with the Twit­ter mobile app. It lets you choose which mes­sage to the user sends, this means you can also include hastags.

TAP TO CALL
If you have a phone num­ber dis­played on your ad remem­ber with mobile you can tap it to make a call mobile devices.

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

Mobile users nat­ively use apps, so why not ust­l­ise this. Have a link to down­load the app in the app store.

COUNT­DOWN
Users can see a count­down and date when your product or ser­vice will launch, this date can also be added to the calendar.

DRAG
Inter­ac­tion a using drag and drop mech­an­ism works well on Smart­phones, the touch­screen lends itself well to these type of phys­ical activities.

FOURSQUARE

App installed on users mobile phones can be used to good effect. For example with Groupon users can expand a ban­ner to find a store near them and get a coupon. They can then click on a loc­a­tion and check in with foursquare. Once they have checked in the coupon becomes unlocked.

GEO FEN­CING
In mobile ads we can tar­get ads so they only dis­play in cer­tain loc­a­tions i.e areas of high dens­ity shop­ping. This is a great way of tar­get­ing cus­tom­ers only in the rel­ev­ant location.

GYRO/TILT
There are many oppor­tun­it­ies to use tilt in mobile ads. Types of uses might include tilt to change col­our, tilt to go to next scene, shake to randomise.

INS­TAGRAM
In mobile ads Ins­tagram images can be inter­grated, users can also take a pic­ture and share.  Cel­tra seem to have good integ­ra­tion of this.

MAP

It might be a good idea to integ­rate Google maps in your mobile ad, espe­cially if you want to show the loc­a­tion of phys­ical stores. Mobile devices are used often for nav­ig­a­tion, so it makes sense to do this.

PAINT
Like other sys­tems of inter­ac­tion, paint is a good way to build user engage­ment. Ideas could be a quick paint­ing com­pet­i­tion or adding you own sig­na­ture to objects.

PUZZLE
Puzzles are a great way to engage users, often for hours! Below is a puzzle game built on Centra plat­form for Wiz­ard of OZ.

REAL WORLD IMMERSION

Amo­bee have a good example using tilt to show a vir­tual world over­laid upon the real world.

SHAKE TO REVEAL

Google have a good example where users can shake to reveal ads. In their example they use a snow globe that reveals a mes­sage on shake.

SWIPE

Swipe is another tech­nique that is very sat­is­fy­ing on touch­screen device. This is good for ideas that involve swip­ping – such as swipe to cut, kick and reveal more con­tent. Below is an example by Centra for snickers.

SLIDE
A slide mech­an­ism can be used in many way such as to reveal more con­tent or in more cre­at­ive ways. Mobileads have a good example where the user can swipe between one ad and the other using a divider in the centre of the ad.

WIPE
Wipe works like tra­di­tional scratch cards, so in that sense it’s quite organic and feel “right”. Below is a great example from McDonalds.

If you are an agency or brand and need Rich Media mobile sup­port then please get in touch or send us a tweet on Twit­ter at @fit_digital