Consumers are spending more time on smartphones, tablets, wearables, and other mobile devices than ever, enough so that BuzzFeed West Coast VP Terry City recently declared “if it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work.” Ad rates, however, are nearly one-fifth of current desktop ad rates, meaning that mobile isn’t getting a cut of ad revenue fair to current usage rates.
Part of the problem with mobile advertising rests with the usage of banner ads, a much-loathed platform that doesn’t exactly scale well to handheld screens. This is where native advertising, ads designed to be less intrusive than their banner counterparts by virtue of seamless integration into site content, comes in.
Polar, a native advertising platform used by a number of major digital media outlets, performed a study to investigate native advertising’s state of affairs on mobile. According to Polar, native advertisements do much better on mobile than ad-cluttered desktops; not all mobile devices are equal, however, as click-through rates are significantly higher on smartphones than “desktop-lite” tablets.
What kind of editorial content brings clicks in, though According to Polar, humor and satire rule the roost, with a 0.04 lead over “how-to” engagement rates. “Informational” content rounds out the pack at 1.3.
Unfortunately, marketers still prefer to buy native by desktop with a 73 percent -27 percent lead over mobile. It’s been suggested that this may be the biggest obstacle to full-throated mobile adoption; though handheld devices are certainly here to stay, publishers have a ways to go before native ads are able to hop on the mobile bandwagon.
