AdWeek Europe: Native And Social Media Advertising Is The Future Of Mobile

“Advertising that does not look like advertising” was suggested by Tejal Patel of Microsoft.

The future of mobile advertising isn’t banner advertising but contextually relevant native and social media advertising. This is also key if brands are going to tackle ad blocking in the mobile space, as well as persuade millennials to trade their data privacy for greater personalisation.

This was the view of Tejal Patel, director of digital marketing and consumer engagement at Microsoft, who spoke alongside Ben Phillips, global head of mobile at MediaCom, and moderator Graham Moysey, head of international at AOL, on “Mobilising the Future” panel at an AdWeek session.

Patel addressed the problem of ad blocking through the lens of how brands are engaging consumers on their mobile devices. “From the client side, we are asking more and more about (mobile) advertising that doesn’t look like advertising. Native advertising is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our media plans, and social media advertising, Facebook News Feeds for example, overcomes some of the issues and is now a big part of our strategy.”

Patel claimed that the advertising and marketing community needed to quickly address ad blocking by listening to consumers’ concerns, and that the industry needed to seek more creative solutions. She was adamant that “the solution isn’t just more creative advertising banners that are more targeted, it is more about content, content partnerships, and video.” This, she suggested, would require a move away from banner ads, and reframing and redefining mobile much more in terms of content.

Mediacom’s Phillips suggested that the problem was being exacerbated by the poor quality of much of mobile banner creative. He claimed that repurposing creative, originally developed for the desktop or other digital media, was wholly inappropriate and that creative agencies needed to work harder when it came to harnessing the opportunities that mobile delivers.