The four things every Marketer should be asking of their agencies to ensure their digital advertising shows up successfully across all screens.
1. Make sure that your media agency buys mobile impressions on smartphones and tablets. For your media agency, this may mean selecting mobile-specific placements on large publishers or networks. It could also mean choosing niche networks and publishers that focus only on mobile placements. Mobile apps represent a majority of the time spent on mobile phones. Don’t forget to include mobile app inventory in addition to mobile web inventory in your media buy.
2. Make sure that your creative agency designs the ad creative with multiple devices in mind. To create the best cross-screen ads, it’s critical for your creative agency to be thinking multi-screen from the outset. Smartphones and tablets provide different opportunities for brand exposure than desktop. Taking advantage of the different form-factors of these devices (e.g. the ability to tilt, touch, swipe, and shake these devices) is key to building engaging and personal experiences for customers. The calling capability and location-based targeting are two other important elements of smartphones that your agency can take advantage of when designing engaging brand experiences.
3. Make sure that your creative developers or production shop builds your ad creative in a mobile-compatible format.
Your creative developers need to use a mobile-compatible format such as HTML5 to build your ad creative. While static images and standard banners can run on mobile sites, HTML5 allows you to run interactive rich media and video ads on mobile placements — the types of ads that engage consumers and that consumers have come to expect.
In addition, these mobile-compatible ads also function well on desktops, so you can build a single ad creative that will look beautiful and function well on any screen.
4. Make sure that your media agency can measure the performance of the mobile placements in your ad campaigns.
Before running your ad campaign, confirm that you have the necessary reporting in place to track the success of your mobile campaigns. Smartphones and tablets present a more complex reporting situation, because these devices can’t use the same “cookies” that are used on desktop to measure conversions. You want to confirm that you’re set up to measure conversions at least within a given device environment.
