Mobile advertisers received some bad news on Friday. According to a new report from YouGov, mobile users are quickly growing tired of the flurry of mobile ads that bombard their small screens on an incessant basis.
An advance copy of the study’s findings was released to Tech Crunch today, and the report shows a sobering fact to the mobile advertising and marketing community.
“People basically feel like there are too many ads,” TechCrunch highlights, “and that they are too pervasive.”
The situation seems to be a vicious circle. Users are engaging with ads less and less: response rates that were at an average of seven percent in 1997 have today plummeted down to 0.1 percent for an average online ad. The solution? Serve more ads to get the respond numbers up. The result? More annoyance with online ads, and even less engagement: total digital ad impressions for all media in 2011 were at 5 trilliion, compared to 200 billion in 1997, according to comScore.
The report clearly raises red flags for the industry , which may have to reevaluate its strategy moving forward – a strategy that has to be based on something more than just flooding consumers with mobile ads.
“How you connect with people effectively is going to be a major battleground over the next few years,” said Marco Veremis, chairman of Upstream, which commissioned the survey. “We need to look at targeting in a different way than we’ve been taught as marketeers.”
Are you among those who are growing weary in the face of mobile advertising’s market deluge? Please weigh in with a thought or comment below.