Tablets have always interested us at Cream. We find them a particular good advertising vehicle for our premium and luxury clients for 2 reasons.
Firstly, there’s the ’self-filtered’ nature of the audience. According to YouGov, almost 30% of the UK population now own a tablet and 2/3s of those tablet owners are ABC1s. And, unlike many new technologies, there’s isn’t a strong ’youth bias’ – 50% of tablet owners are 45+ – or a ‘male’ bias, as women are more likely to own tablets than men.
Secondly, there’s the nature of the advertising itself – delivered one-to-one on a high resolution, large format, vibrant colour screen with the opportunity for video and interactivity. In short, it’s the best digital vehicle for showcasing the ‘high production values’ of luxury brands and involving users in their stories.
So we’re always interested when new tablet advertising opportunities become available, and 2 we’ve heard about in the past week have certainly piqued our interest.
The first involves the social feed aggregator Flipboard. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Flipboard is a mobile app that aggregates a user’s feeds from a number of sources – be they Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader or publisher sites – and presents them in an attractive’ magazine’ format which users can ‘flip’ through. It’s particularly popular amongst iPad users.
The FT is about to launch its own content feed for Flipboard with video, blogs, ‘Life & Arts’ and other content being made available for free alongside content that is available to subscribers only (subscribers will be able to use their existing FT.com log-in to access premium content.) The FT are offering advertisers the opportunity to sponsor the content with static ads appearing within their content.
From a publisher perspective, this new distribution channel presents an opportunity to open up new revenue streams. From an advertiser perspective, it potentially offers interesting new targeting opportunities.
How? Well, we talk to many clients who’s definition of their target market is an intersection between 2 publications – perhaps an ‘FT reader who also reads GQ‘. How better to target this hybrid reader than via an aggregator such as Flipboard where a user could be targeted according to the feeds they subscribe to? Want a GQ & FT reader? Just ask Flipboard to serve your advertising to users who subscribe to both those feeds.
This approach is one step on from what’s being offered at the moment, but it’s a natural progression. As is targeting via the nature of the content the user consumes.
The second opportunity is unique to Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which YouGov’s figures suggest was a more popular Christmas gift than either the iPad or iPad Mini.
When you switch on your Kindle Fire in the UK, you get special offers page which it’s possible for advertisers to sponsor. Users can opt out of this page, but opting out means opting out of special offers on books, magazines etc, so most prefer not to.
The opportunity to gain the attention of every Kindle Fire user in the UK is attractive in itself, but the potential targeting options make it even more enticing.
As it’s an Amazon device, the potential is there to target users based on their Amazon purchase history. OK, so your type of product may not be purchased on Amazon but that’s not necessarily important. What Amazon purchase behaviour can shed light on is the timing of gift purchases. How much more powerful would it be to target advertising to users when you know they’re in the ‘gifting’ market – when they’re preparing to purchase for a loved one’s birthday or when they’re in the market for purchasing Christmas gifts (be that early or late in the season?)
Of course, advertising isn’t just about audience and timing, it’s about involving creative as well, and we’d stress this importance when it comes to promotions via tablets. We’ve found that creatives that leverage the full potential of the medium for showcasing high quality visuals and incorporating interactivity more than pay back the extra investment required to create them.
Combine high quality, involving creative, a relevant audience and optimum timing and you’ve got an equation that adds up to some highly effective advertising. So if you haven’t already, we’d recommend you take a dip into tablet advertising. The results won’t disappoint and with new opportunities coming to market all the time, things will only get more rewarding.
