The MMA’s Mobile Advertising Guidelines provide recommenda-tions for the ad units broadly used in mobile advertising. This section focuses on the advertising units currently used in the Mobile Web. The guidelines provide recommendations for graphical banner advertising and text links, which are currently the most prevalent form of advertising on the Mobile Web. Read the rest of this entry »
The recommended Mobile Web banner ad widths are 120,168, 216 and 300 pixels. An analysis of mobile phones across multiple markets found that most screens fall into one of those four widths. Providing set widths for banner creative has several benefts:
Keeping the banner widths to four dimensions reduces the amount of time and resources spent on creative production. Read the rest of this entry »
Mobile advertising does not require any particular design principles and style guides. Existing general guidelines should apply to Mobile Web sites containing image banners, as well as to Mobile Web sites that users reach via links in image banners (post-click), such as jump pages, campaign sites and self-contained, permanent third-party Mobile Web sites.
Web design principles and style guides have been available for years, and site owners and publishers are increasingly adopting them.
Those principles include:
Limiting the overall data volume of a Mobile Web page to no more than 20 KB so the download time isn’t longer than most users will wait.
Lim iting the number of retrievals (e.g., of images) per Mobile Web page to 10 in order to reduce page loading delays caused by roundtrip times for each retrieval.
Limiting user input to numeric or short sequences of text.
This principle is based on the fact that most phones lack a QWERTY keyboard. The majority of users must enter text using their phone’s numeric keypad.
MMS is an attractive vehicle for mobile advertising because it provides a variety of rich media experiences for increasing an ad’s effectiveness. Another beneft is that unlike the Mobile Web, this media resides on the user’s mobile phone, so a data connection isn’t required to access the ad content once the message has been received. Read the rest of this entry »
Text taglines are an optional feature that can be added to an image banner. (Note: Text taglines are prevalent in North America). Text taglines have several advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
Most consumers are unfamiliar with image banners on Mobile Web sites. Many also don’t realize that image banners can be navigated to and clicked on, as they already do with banners viewed on a PC. But they may have a much greater awareness that text taglines can be navigated to and clicked on. Read the rest of this entry »
Some publishers and ad-serving solutions provide this capability, where the ad creative is re-sized on the fy in order to match the mobile phone’s screen size and capabilities. In order to optimize the banner creative, the MMA recommends that the basic and extended technical specifcations for banner creative be applied in the case of automatic resizing. This will ensure that the creative is best suited for the specifc mobile phone and that there are no additional creative format requirements for the advertisers. Read the rest of this entry »
The new Television without Frontiers directive would support the use of new forms of advertising. Split-screen, virtual advertising, mini-spots and interactive advertising would all be permitted by the proposed new directive, which also clarifies rules on “product placement” (placing a specific brand, such as James Bond’s Aston Martin, in a TV show or film), whether provided on traditional TV or via an on-demand service. Product placement as such is not addressed as such by the current TV without Frontiers Directive, which prohibits this only if it takes the form of “surreptitious advertising” by a broadcaster. Product placement is nonetheless common practice in independently produced Works and feature films, without any appropriate consumer protection and without clear rules that would give investors in content certainty on the laws applicable. Read the rest of this entry »
The update of the TV without Frontiers directive would remove quantitative limits on advertising and greatly simplify the rules on inserting advertisements in TV programmes. The current three-hours-per-day limit on advertising would be dropped - in practice, no non-specialist TV channel in Europe comes near it, so it is clearly superfluous and incompatible with the principle of better regulation. Insertion rules would be made simplerand more flexible. Read the rest of this entry »
Under the updated TV without Frontiers directive, all audiovisual advertising, whatever medium is used to deliver it, would have to meet basic requirements, already known for traditional TV broadcasting, including an obligation to identify the advertiser, not to link alcohol consumption to enhanced physical performance or to driving, a prohibition on surreptitious advertising and certain restrictions on advertising directed at minors. These requirements would in future apply to all such content, irrespective of the technology that delivers it, thus ensuring proportionate consumer protection also in a “multimedia world”.
