Cannes POV: It’s time to talk about that dumb mobile ad

This sponsored post is produced by Fetch. 

This year the biggest advertising festival in the world, the Cannes International Festival of Creativity, gets even more connected and makes one helluva noise as boundaries between data, creativity, robotics, and emotion all collide. It’s where agencies polish their creative work and look back at their year, but more importantly, the festival is increasing the number of ad networks, programmatic traders, and mobile vendors wooing their targets in ever more extravagant beachside parties or on elegant marina-side yachts.

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How does mobile fare in all this?

Mobile wins respect for its ability to connect platforms and people in innovative ways, notably with Google scooping the Grand Prix for its cardboard AR device. The virtual-reality reader that is constructed from cardboard produces a type of technology that is both low-cost and accessible to all. Within mobile, the device allows for innovative ways to reach and impact consumers.

Mobile is informing new big collaborations and businesses. Snapchat recently partnered with advertising giant WPP to launch a new global content marketing company called Truffle Pig. Their hopes are to become a juggernaut in mobile video ads. Elsewhere, Oreo maker Mondelez announced a new deal with Facebook to help sell its famous cookies online. They’ll continue creating native and engaging video content for platforms to push social engagement.

This year there’s been a lot of emphasis on artificial intelligence at the festival and looking to the future. According to AKQA’s Rei Inamoto, machines will become “as smart or even smarter than human beings.”

So why are many mobile ads still so dumb?

This is one of the topics our creatives just covered off at a forum dedicated specifically to the business of creating mobile advertising for real people — and not for devices. We believe people must remain at the center of the creative process. Yet, there’s a great deal of complacency conspring to make brands accept what amounts to just a 1 percent click-through-rate on poorly-executed mobile advertising (which so often looks like an afterthought). We’d like to challenge this: 1 percent is simply not high enough. What about the other 99 percent of users who see these ads?

At Cannes, it’s easy to avoid talking about the complacency in mobile advertising creation rather than celebrate the latest shiny new toy. But, then again, what better place to elevate the status of the craft of creative on a screen the size of your back pocket? One that communicates with you at the right time and at the right moment, and at scale? It’s simply a wildly underrated art form. It’s why, according to research by Forrester, just 5 percent of the average brand budget goes to mobile. When we read that stat, we understand it to mean that only 5 percent of a brand’s priority is given to mobile.

This always-on mobile experience is why Facebook is talking up its ability to target ‘moments’ in our lives. Its new creative studio has data-first teams feed in the ‘actionable insights’ into their ad creators to build campaigns targeting users through demographics, sentiment, and time of day. And it’s a pretty intricate business — we’re talking about brands getting used to creating up to 30 different iterations for the same campaign depending on where a person is at that day. That intricacy and intimacy essential without ever losing the connection to the person at the end of the device.

In defense of pixel pushing

It’s time to advocate pixel pushing because in the business of mobile creative, pixel pushing actually really matters. Strong creative and experiences matter. We’re talking about getting the conversation right with the two billion global smartphone market — and actually caring about understanding the consumer, and what they want.

But forget the old mobile consumer, we’re talking about the new consumer who is so hyper-active that we need to consider what they may be doing at any one time during the day. That means considering what they’re doing when they check their smartphone every nine minutes (that’s 144 times a day), and being thoughtful and strategic about what message, visual, and advertising we’re delivering to them at that moment.

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So before we leap into the next evolution, from the digital to the social or connected age, or into the AI age, let’s not forget how to talk to real people. We didn’t forget how to speak to people when they started suddenly carrying around a super computer. We just started talking too much to the computer instead of the person.

Frank Lipari is Creative Director at Fetch.

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