Rupert Staines, an exec­u­tive at dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing com­pa­ny Radi­u­mOne, has dubbed 2014 “the year of mobile adver­tis­ing” — and giv­en the fig­ures he crunch­es, no one with media jobs in mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies can be left in any doubt that he makes a sound point.

Bad habits 

Radi­u­mOne, which has offices in New York, San Fran­cis­co, Chica­go, Europe and Aus­tralia, has an impres­sive­ly smart approach to mobile adver­tis­ing, which we’ll come to in a while. But there’s a prob­lem: despite the fact that the oppor­tu­ni­ties for reach­ing con­sumers are vast (Staines cites eMar­keter stats fore­cast­ing that the glob­al smart­phone audi­ence will break 1.75 bil­lion in 2014), mobile adver­tis­ing is still being used sur­pris­ing­ly badly.

Staines chides adver­tis­ers for using a “clut­ter bomb approach”, indis­crim­i­nate­ly spray­ing as many ads at mobile devices as pos­si­ble, hop­ing that some con­sumers, some­where, will bite. But it’s coun­ter­pro­duc­tive as well as dam­ag­ing: today’s con­sumers live in the era of hyper-tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing and they expect to receive ads rel­e­vant to their inter­ests. Frankly, they get annoyed if they keep get­ting mes­sages that have noth­ing to do with them, Staines avers.

Get­ting smart

He advo­cates a two pronged remedy:

i) Always inte­grate mobile adver­tis­ing into the full dig­i­tal cam­paign. Treat­ing it as a sep­a­rate band­wag­on that has to be jumped on with­out any real thought just leads to the mon­stros­i­ty of clut­ter bomb advertising.

ii) Use the data on mobile use by con­sumers effec­tive­ly. No oth­er device is, as Staines puts it, “always on and always there.” This pro­vides adver­tis­ers with invalu­able data on app use, con­sumer loca­tion and inter­net brows­ing on the hoof. When desk­top and mobile data are brought togeth­er, adver­tis­ers increase their chances of reach­ing their next buy­ing cus­tomer drastically.

Staines explains:

“The key is to treat mobile and desk­top adver­tis­ing as dif­fer­ent out­lets of the same ad cam­paign. Intel­li­gent adver­tis­ing tech­nol­o­gy such as RadiumOne’s closed-loop soft­ware plat­form that gen­er­ates data in real-time, absorbs the data on an inte­grat­ed data man­age­ment plat­form enables mar­keters to buy ad impres­sions and serve them to the same rel­e­vant con­sumer across any device. Nat­u­ral­ly, as the for­mats dif­fer, the con­sumer will be served dif­fer­ent ver­sions of an advert to suit the device, ensur­ing the mes­sage res­onates across all platforms.”

2014, he con­cludes, isn’t the year of mobile; it’s the year of mobile advertising.