Rebound for Retail: How Mobile Can Achieve Memorability for Retailers

Over the past few years, there’s been an increasing shift towards online retail, particularly with many of the attitudes adopted over the course of the pandemic now a part of everyday life. And many of these transactions are being carried out on mobile devices through different channels, such as “traditional” e-commerce platforms and social platforms.

Indeed, the growing interest in mobile commerce has helped contribute to the mobile advertising industry now representing 60 percent of all digital ad spend, with it set to be worth a little under $400 billion by 2024. However, in this crowded space where consumer attention is at a premium, the majority of mobile ads are uninspiring, forgettable and unengaging. As a result, consumers aren't engaging meaningfully with the ads they see.

Retailers need to take note of the fact that ads that are remembered are more likely to be acted upon. Reusing assets and creating static ads won’t create memorability — interactive ads designed specifically for mobile will.

Creating an Engaging Experience

As we move away from intrusive third-party data collection practices towards a privacy-focused digital advertising ecosystem, the focus for retailers has to be on using creativity and anonymized data to grab the attention of consumers.

By using interactive mobile ads, retailers can create an environment that's ripe for engagement — the truest form of attention. In turn, re-focusing on engagement provides an avenue for retailers to continue measuring campaign effectiveness beyond the use of third-party cookies or other identifiers.

The industry must evolve beyond using viewability as the standard metric for measuring campaign effectiveness. Engagement is superior as it only takes note of actual ad interactions, rather than assuming a user has acknowledged an ad simply because it was on their screen for a period of time.

Creativity will be at the heart of this shift towards engagement, having been widely neglected thanks to a reliance on third-party data to track and target consumers. However, retailers now have an opportunity to embrace creativity, drive engagement, and produce better results.

Intelligently Standing Out From the Crowd

Adopting mobile-first solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can help bring mobile campaigns to life with interactive, creative elements. These solutions can provide retailers with not just the tools to be creative and measure campaign effectiveness, but also with behavioral data to help them make informed decisions about future campaigns.

AI technology can identify the content and ad formats that tend to produce the most engagement from years of historical creative data — something that a human wouldn’t be capable of doing — and use that data to optimize campaigns toward driving the highest possible engagement. And, importantly, all of the data used is anonymized, making it the perfect tactic for the future of digital advertising.

For example, AI can analyze granular attributes such as text placement, branding and product placement within a campaign to determine what combination will work best to maximize engagement. Consequently, retail ads that have been optimized with this technology average an engagement rate of 27 percent and a clickthrough rate (CTR) of 3.8 percent. This compares favorably with the average CTR for static ads that are delivered on Google Display Network (0.4 percent) and Facebook (0.8 percent).

In the increasingly crowded mobile ad space, as well as the congested retail sector, producing unforgettable campaigns — backed by creativity, data and the right solutions — is the key for retailers to stand out from the crowd. The promise of increased engagement, brand recall, and return on investment is there for retailers, but it’s going to take data-informed creative campaigns to realize that outcome.

Paul Coggins is the CEO of Adludio, a global technology company that produces sensory mobile ads for agencies and brands.