There’s already been much discussion of some early advertising metrics on the iPad. The following results were published a couple of days ago by ad mediator AdMarvel (owned by Opera), TextPlus and PointRoll (owned by publisher Gannett):
Campaigns that ran the first four weeks after the iPad launch delivered average interaction times across advertisers of 30 seconds, and as high as 53 seconds for one advertiser. Time spent with each ad correlated with the amount of content included in the ads.
In addition, interaction rates (measuring the number of people tapping to expand and engaging with the ads, as a percentage of impressions) ranged from .9% to 1.5% in the first month of the campaign, up to 6 times the benchmark for comparable click-to-expand ads on the desktop. In addition, 67% of users who viewed a video component of the ad in the app watched it all the way through, compared to 53% completion rate for desktop. These findings show that the iPad can be a successful supplement to a 360-degree campaign across devices to strengthen and further lift audience engagement.
(Emphasis added; see ad demo.)
Dynamic Logic and Insight Express have both shown that mobile ads consistently outperform PC advertising across a wide range of metrics and brand indicators. The question of course is whether the increased engagement and metrics are the byproduct of novelty or whether these platforms are going to consistently deliver better performance over time.
Some of this better performance is clearly novelty but other factors such as less ad clutter and greater “share of voice” on pages make for higher engagement and improved response. Websites on the PC or “fixed” Internet have become a veritable wasteland of clutter and low quality ad content. That’s partly why Apple’s Safari 5 enables users to eliminate ads from the page.
Even as the Internet has fragmented audiences and eroded if not destroyed some traditional media (e.g., newspapers), online advertising, with the exception of search and one or two other areas, has largely failed.
The iPad is not a PC, nor is it really a mobile device in the same form as a smartphone. It’s more of a portable PC with apps. We still don’t have enough data to know how people use and will use the iPad and its many forthcoming rivals. In my house it has taken time from PC exposure but it’s much more a “leisure” or “lean back” device than the PC, which is mostly utilitarian.
If that use case holds generally for tablets it could be that people will be more receptive to display and rich media ads on them vs. the PC.