Struggling with messages for smaller screens

Dubai: Cast your mind on regional ad campaigns specifically created for your mobile phone and that captured your immediate attention from the first second. If you are still thinking, don’t worry, there weren’t any.

Regional advertisers and brand marketers are unanimous in highlighting the virtues of the mobile platforms, but they are still at the drawing board stage when it comes to putting compelling ad themes on them. Does the relatively small canvas – a 5-inch smartphone screen or even a 9.7-inch tablet – get in the way of creativity?

“The smaller screen does not work against creativity but it is actually challenging it; the daily usage of a smaller screen is drastically different than a classic laptop or a tablet,” said Grégory Bolle, strategic planning head at BPG Group.

“Advertisers need to recognize the usage, particularity of the smaller screen, to adopt the right format to provoke further interactions with end-users. The traditional error of advertisers is to plug the same content across all the four existing screens - TV, laptop, smartphone and tablet) – without questioning the real functionality of this content for each screen.”

The downside is that a transition to creating compelling branding content in the Mena ad markets will be a slow process.

It is not that dedicated advertising does not exist for the mobile platform. It does, but what is there of it is one-dimensional and confined to broadcasting messages rather than “developing a story”. Of course, there are also the in-game ad placements, but these do not reach beyond a core audience.

“This come from two different factors [and] one of them is definitely structural,” said Bolle “Most of the top international brands are operating in the region under license with a third-party distributor. The distributor is more inclined to use ad budgets to improve their sales volume rather than build a loyal relationship with a client base.

“The second one factor is also contextual - brands and agencies in Mena are still at the infancy stage of what we call “story-scaping” or “pull strategy”.”

The global consulting firm Deloitte estimates that digital ad spend in the region at $175 million in 2011, which is still only 4 per cent of the overall advertising dollars spent in these markets that year. While no official data is available on what the digital spend last year, the broad consensus is that the $200 million has been breached. Just to place these numbers in context, global ad spend on digital formats was $100 billion last year, according to Deloitte. Any which way one dissects these figures, the broader perspective suggests ad agencies and brands better get up to speed on creating digital content with appeal.

One of the factors that Deloitte sees as driving up the digital advertising in the region is the omnipresence of the “Millenials”, those less than 25 years old and who make up more than 50 per cent of the region’s population. “The Millennials are driving the consumption of and engagement with content via multiple digital tools, including social networking platforms, mobile applications and online videos,” the Deloitte report states.

“Based on research conducted globally, the Millennials spend an average of more than seven hours each day consuming media content of which a significant proportion of time is spent on their mobile phones. Globally this generation devotes an average of almost two hours per day to mobile media, ahead of television (1.5 hours) and the desktop (1.6 hours).”

Another key factor whereby digital advertising in this region will come into its own at some point is the “proliferation” of digital ad agencies. But it does come with an in-built speed breaker – Deloitte suggests that “Several businesses still consider their organizations’ use of digital media is inadequate and a further 30 per cent of businesses claim that an effective assessment of return of investment on digital media is not feasible.”