Mobile advertising is highly effective, but measuring that effectiveness has been far too difficult.  The reasons are well documented: multiple devices, online reports don’t translate to mobile, what you can measure technically varies from online given different forms of interaction (e.g. no mouseover), lack of standard definitions, etc.

In Phase 1 of Mobile Advertising (pre-2010), this lack of post-click analytics was fine; ringtone and other direct response advertisers simply wanted to sell product and could care less about engaging the user.  But brand advertisers demand more – they want to know detailed information about how their campaigns perform well after the click (or tap).

It was good to see Kathryn Koegel call out Steve Jobs in Ad Age for talking about CTR (click-thru rate) as the way to measure iAd effectiveness.  As she points out, "just admit it's a DR (direct response) business based on gaming and not some kind of brand engagement play as his ad examples showed.  We all know about the fallacy of clicks as a pure measure of ad impact."

Crisp tracks metrics that matter to brands, and does so across platforms and devices.  It’s probably the most important thing we do – delivering a unified report to enable agencies to measure their campaign’s effectiveness and optimize on the fly.  Once dominated by performance ads, more and more mobile sites and apps now feature ads from Fortune 500 marketers.  These top brands realize the importance of reaching their target audience on the most personal of devices.  And now that they can track interactions like display time and video plays or incorporate games and surveys into mobile ads, they are hooked.

Emotion and magic are great for press events, but that’s not why brands are flocking to mobile.  It’s all about the metrics.

Contact us if you’d like to see a sample report.

ClickZ to my knowledge is the first site to dedicate a 10 minute video (see below) to reviewing mobile ads. The fact that they reviewed only the Wired iPad app advertising in itself is worth noting in terms of how important the iPad is to advertisers and publishers. Since the video is long I’ll boil it down for you, they were unhappy with the lack of interactivity, and since there were so many ads in the app, and because print ads are not by nature interactive, it was probably really difficult for Wired’s sales team to do much. We’ve been a part of the process of digitizing print ads for iPad apps over the past two months and we thought it would be great to do a deeper dive into what’s in the Wired App and offer some perspective, pointers and thoughts on how advertisers could do better.