IIn the world of today, advertising is everywhere. What is more, advertisers are doing their best to be as accurate as humanly possible in tracking down exactly who you are. They do so in order to make their ads more “relevant” and hopefully increase the probabilities of you purchasing their products.
Retargeting makes sure that you see the products of companies, whose websites you have visited. Unfortunately irrespective of whether you actually bought the product or not. Social media marketers are trying to drill down into your specific “likes”, demographics and friend networks, again without any concerns for your reasons for liking certain pages or products. In the end, they do not really know who you are and what you really want. Partly because neither do you.
Online marketing is so focused on CPM’s, CTR’s and targeting, that they are no longer telling stories but are simply measuring up numbers. Many marketing campaigns fail because of over-targeting. Yet, as we have argued in our previous posts about Adtile, it is not really their fault. It is the industry itself and the lack of innovation that might not have created the right tools to get the job done.
Adtile, a mobile advertising company that first introduced a brand new way of displaying online and especially mobile ads, and then mobile ads that can utilize all of the sensors in mobile phones, is again taking it up a notch. This time, they are looking at a new way of serving ads by linking them to the weather around you.
Nils Forsblom, the CEO and founder of the company tells ArcticStartup that “it is not about targeting. It is more about branding the story, it brings location and story to life. I think that any static advertising is dead boring. Especially on mobile. With mobile weather ads, you can have a more emotional connection with a brand experience compared to what you typically have.”
What the company has done is tap into a number of weather API’s, and by gathering the weather around you can now basically create ads that tell you a story based on that.
For instance, it might be raining in Helsinki this week or the weather might be below zero degrees celsius. So if you stumble upon an Adtile weather ad, it might ask you to point your phone in different directions, it would then display several cities with better weather conditions in that direction. So you can get a discounted flight to the warmer destination of your choice right there and then. Check out the video below for more examples.
The cool thing about this is not just weather per say, but the whole approach to making mobile ads work better, which is not an easy task.
Mobile phones/tablets are perhaps the most private devices in our daily lives. The ads on them are intrusive by definition. Think of TV ads – we are used to them, they are a part of our lives. So are outdoor ads. Yet, on the mobile phone, there is just not a lot of space and we enjoy having full control of what is displayed there.
The mobile experience is also interactive. Compared to the desktop, we are used to swiping, pushing, pinching, pulling, pressing. Even my one year old kid will not be interested in the phone, unless there is some interactive possibilities.
Ads, need to follow suit to make it work. They need to feel unobtrusive, native, interactive and most of all – they need to tell a story. This is why Adtile is interesting, as they seem to be on the right path to tick all the boxes.
Of course, they still need to make sure that they can find other possible data sets that they can plug into, while securing a way to scale and introduce these ads to the global market.
It helps that according to Forsblom, the company has filed patents to cover every possible mobile and wearable device, when it comes to motion sensing advertising. Whether that is a mobile phone, Google Glass or the next smartwatch.
According to a source, they are also working with global size players on both the data API’s and general ad distribution side of things, personally I would love to see banner advertisement gone from mobile phone and if Adtile will be the company to do it – great.
