Small Screen, Tall Order - wireless advertising offers new kinds of creative options

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but for the shapers of wireless advertising, it's the heart of a new and unpredictable creative world. Packing a marketing message into a few inches of screen space on cell phones, pagers and PDAs is a tall order, one that can send even the cleverest copywriters and art directors scurrying for cover. Still, accepting its limitations, many say wireless offers new kinds of creative options that don't need to be flashy to be compelling.

"Wireless has some great strengths, including its immediacy and contact sensitivity. But the big trade-off is the creative limitations," admits Tom Bair, director of convergence technologies at SF Interactive and head of the ad standards initiative at the Wireless Advertising Association. Primary among the drawbacks, of course, is the lack of space and color. In the U.S., few cell-phone models can display much more than 100 characters at a time. (PDAs have more space, but are still quite limited.) And of the devices that can show graphics, most feature simple 1-bit color depth, which supports only black-and-white images. The resulting pared-down ads--with brief messages and perhaps a logo--can be frustrating to advertisers that have traditionally built their brands under TV lights and on billboards.

"Corporate IDs and brands were conceived before wireless, so much of it doesn't translate," explains Tiffany Young, an associate creative director at SF Interactive. A company like UPS, for example, whose brand is linked so closely to the color brown, will have trouble with the black-and-white restrictions. "Sometimes we end up not running the logo and instead just speak in the client's voice," Young says.

There are other creative challenges. The dimensions of wireless screens vary widely, making it difficult to create uniform ads that will work on each. Also, the variety of mobile data technologies means different types of ads must be coded differently. For example, the two main categories of wireless ads--"push" and "pull" ads--generally reach users through different languages. Push ads, which are sent directly to users, usually as short bursts of text, generally use the Short Message Service format. Pull ads, which are placed on browsed wireless sites, must be coded in the same language that connects users to the wireless Web--in the U.S., generally the Wireless Application Protocol. Even within WAP, though, there are competing markup languages, complicating the issue, and in Japan another technology is the clear leader: iMode, written in a markup language called c-HTML.

Faced with this kind of diversity, creatives naturally look for standards. But none have been adopted industrywide--yet. "What colors can you use? What applications do you make the graphics in? What about images and animation? How many pixels wide can the images be? For designers, there are no answers," Young says. "There's no Adobe Wireless like there's an Adobe Photoshop." The WAA is moving to develop creative guidelines and other standards for push and pull ads. Among the efforts by many WAA members, WindWire last fall conducted a trial of pull in which six interactive agencies, seven wireless publishers and 14 advertisers delivered 105 ads to consumers through 22 different campaigns. The results indicated a preferred length for text messages (no more than 40 characters on a phone, 60 on a PDA); preferred dimensions for images (60x20 pixels for phone banners; 153x15 pixels for PDA banners); and a time limit (five seconds, plus a skip feature) for interstitials. These results and those from other WAA-member trials to develop standards will factor into the association's efforts going forward.

"As early adopters, we had a certain sense of what might work," says David Wilson, co-founder and executive vp of WindWire. "We also sat down with agencies to brainstorm and did behavioral and attitudinal studies with the consumers who actually saw these ads." Understandably, the early ad templates, both for branding and direct response, have been fairly basic. The WindWire trial, for instance, focused on three types: interstitials, which feature graphics and interactive text across the entire device display and are timed to appear briefly before a Web page loads; rich ads, which are embedded at the top of pages and feature interactive capabilities such as graphics, pull-down menus and click-through or call-through response mechanisms; and, finally, simple text ads. Though they are all early models, these pull ads met with positive results--including a 15.5 percent response rate for call-to-action executions.

As with any nascent technology, of course, much of the hype is currently centered on wireless' possibilities. Along with the creative improvements that will arrive with ad standards, better devices, more uniform technologies and improved bandwidth are targeting options that may be quite effective. Though the ads may remain visually less alluring, creatives say the power to deliver them at specific times to specific people (and, eventually, to specific locations) could make them uniquely compelling. An effective creative solution, in other words, may no longer rely as much on the physical dimensions of an ad as on other, possibly more useful dimensions--those of time and place. "Yes, the screen is small, but the functionality is much greater," says Mikko Myyrylainen, leader of the WAA's location task force and a senior partner at Contra, which has several clients in the mobile space. "Advertisers need to think on a different level." To begin with, he says, they must resist simply translating traditional media for the mobile space--straining print ads, for instance, into wireless ads. "The brand policemen will say, 'How does a valuable Mercedes-Benz logo look on this crummy little screen" he says. "But there needs to be a holistic approach.... The whole point is, it complements other media. Another medium--TV, print, outdoor--initiates the campaign, but mobile is the perfect interactive enabler."

After a year tussling in wireless, Young tends to agree. "We were already constrained [creatively] with the Web, and it looked like it would only get worse with wireless," she says. "But now that we've been in it, we actually feel more free.... Instead of asking ourselves how to design things to fit on the cell phone screens, we're asking when it will reach the consumer. Wireless will be one of the ways to remain relevant, to reach people right where their decisions are made." For designers who have a background in the Web and interactive games, it's nor much of a stretch. "They're used to following people's movements through Web sites," she says. "And how people move through Web sites is how they move through their lives."

In these early days, the basic paradox remains: Wireless, an exceptionally personal and fragile space, needs compelling creative to win consumers over (or, at least, not turn them off). Yet its physical limitations squeeze the creative possibilities. Until the space matures enough to solve this dilemma, creatives and advertisers will have to make do with what's at hand--boosted, perhaps, by the cachet of being on the cutting edge of the Next Big Thing. "It's challenging," Wilson says. "But it also has a certain sex appeal."

Tom Curran is a freelance writer based in New York.

10 Steps for Making Your Advertising Mobile

1. Go for the jugular. Make the ad shorter, more direct, using less ad talk. The promo is the payoff--not glossy copy. Leave branding to the medium more suited to the task.

2. Say cheese! Even an opt-in ad is something of an intrusion. Make your offer smile, because you know what? Tomorrow you're doing it again. Use content, fun, relevant dialogue and respect.

3. Kiss first, hug later. With the exception of ads above urinals, the mobile ad is the most intimate around. You're getting in people's faces like never before. Give them the goods as fast as you can, and then give them the hug, if they want it. And then ...

4. One sheep at a time. Sell the ranch, but sell it one sheep at a time. Your customers will come back again. Don't give them more than they can carry at one time.

5. Abracadabra! For quite some time to come, mobile ads and promos will be magical. Keep that magic alive, dynamic. You're not limited by text, you're liberated by it. Play with language to keep things spicy and entertaining.

6. The sound of one hand clapping. Mobility works best when it complements TV, radio, print, etc. Integrate your mobile ads with existing ad campaigns. Let other media send the message. Let mobile make the sale.

7. Roy Rogers says: The mobile device is the ultimate trigger. It's actionable, so find ways to create more interactivity. SMS, lists, games, referrals--when they're relevant, they add to the experience and add value to the m-space.

8. Think 3-D. If the business is location-specific, make the phone "telepathic." Anticipate what your end user might be experiencing at the moment, and surprise her.

9 RUOVR18? Know UR audience, and WT forms of slang & cell-miotics U can use. Add personalization using pertinent jargon, & save space with abbreviations.

10. Tomahawk smarts. Like with the missile, you can make after-launch changes in your in-tactics. You can't be overprepared for customer response, and your follow-ups must be immediate.

Source: Mikko Myyrylainen, leader of the WAA's location task force and a senior partner at Contra

COPYRIGHT 2001 BPI Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group