Is This The Future of Advertising?

    Let’s get one thing straight – advertising sucks. Not because it is bad on a moral level or because it is annoying. It is bad because it is just boring and outdated. The little innovation that did happen in the industry mostly revolved around better ways of tricking you into seeing ads. But then we saw this video:

    Need we say more? Finally, somebody figured out that we have all this amazing technology at our fingertips. That this technology has GPS, accelerometers, sensors and that all of this can be used for advertising.

    With that, as shown in the video, you ads become little applications of their own. Allowing you to make an ad that would ask you to say start running. It would then detect that you are actually doing that and display a discounted offer for shoes or other relevant rewards. It can even automatically show directions to the nearest shop or a shop in the direction that you are moving, this last bit is powered through a partnership with Yelp, which is also behind Apple Maps.

    This is what the recently revealed Adtile Mobile Ads do. Running on completely native code, they can use your device to the full and provide an impressive toolkit to advertisers, allowing a lot of room for creativity.

    So why does this matter?

    The last time when we covered Adtile, we briefly went into the history of advertising as a whole and today I wanted to discuss the history of online advertising. The very first e-advertising that took place was through e-mail. The practice spread like a storm. It was the bomb, people got rich. Soon, however it became known as “spam” and got filtered out.

    Display ads, or banners, entered the scene and at the time, people actually clicked them. Some companies reported 44% click through rates, compared to today’s average of 0.2-0.3%. This too was eradicated, as it was yet another way of tricking us into clicking something. People became ”banner blind”.

    So what was next in-line? Search ads and Social Media ads that are still trending today. They figured out that perhaps we won’t be blind to ads that are right in our search results or within our feeds. Yet people are starting to notice those too and not really enjoy them when they are not 100% relevant.

    So the cycle repeats itself and the whole world is playing hide and seek. Some smart guys hide the ads, and then we try to find them. Leaving it to designers and agencies to actually be creative and create interesting ads.

    Are Adtile Motion Ads different? Judge for yourself, but we will say that unlike previous waves of innovation, they are not hiding the ads but brining them to the front and giving people a lot of tools to make them fun, engaging and actually interesting.

    They are also using modern approach for the task, which is a nice change. The world is going mobile. Our devices are smart and have a lot of sensors within them. Adtile seems to be one of the first companies to make full use of it. Their ads can take use built-in GPS, gyroscope, motion coprocessor, accelerometer, compass, motions, gestures and more.

    Finally they are also on the top of the trend as Gartner predicts that Mobile advertising is the next big thing. Today, around $13.1 billion are spent on mobile ads a year and by 2017 it is predicted to reach $42 billion.

    Again, in the last article, we said that people might eventually get used to the way Adtile displays ads. That may be true for their standard offering, however with Motion Ads it might not be the case. After all, the users are not cheated in any way, they are not tricked into clicking something – instead the ads can talk to us, we can find interesting information if we choose to interact and there are countless ways of creating an interesting ad using this.

    According to Nils Forsblom, the CEO and founder of Adtile Technologies “advertising was meant to capture a persons imagination. The very best ads are very emotional and funny. If you make advertisements that one can relate to, that changes the ads. People will allow it.”

    The TV can sometimes achieve that with brilliantly thought out ads. However, the mobile phone is a completely different beast from TV and everything else out there. For most people it is their day-to-day device and they do not like when something is forced onto them. As Forsblom put it:

    “Mobile is so different because it is such a private venue. I will not find one user on this planet who would use a mobile phone to see ads. It has to be a seamless extension of the application to work and it has to provide value for the user. If it does that, it also does not hijack the app. It does not give me five different messages, it gives me one message. It is actually asking me to do something.”

    So with that in mind, I think that it is safe to say that Adtile Technologies is on the brink of the next advertising revolution, both online and in general.