Swiper no Swiping! A Response to the ClickZ Review of Wired's iPad App Advertising

ClickZ to my knowledge is the first site to dedicate a 10 minute video (see below) to reviewing mobile ads. The fact that they reviewed only the Wired iPad app advertising in itself is worth noting in terms of how important the iPad is to advertisers and publishers. Since the video is long I’ll boil it down for you, they were unhappy with the lack of interactivity, and since there were so many ads in the app, and because print ads are not by nature interactive, it was probably really difficult for Wired’s sales team to do much. We’ve been a part of the process of digitizing print ads for iPad apps over the past two months and we thought it would be great to do a deeper dive into what’s in the Wired App and offer some perspective, pointers and thoughts on how advertisers could do better.

It’s not easy to change creative without creative direction and it’s not easy to make an ad digitally rich unless you’re given the right assets--but, it’s not impossible. Although the ClickZ review was all about the negatives, I would give HBO, eTrade, and Lea & Perrins points for their creative use of gallery buttons. Ads like Lea & Perrins full page ad with hotspots make a flat print ad into something highly interactive. Also, leveraging learnings from mobile content delivery, we’ve been proponents of galleries because it takes big sets of content and makes it bite sized. If you play with the Lea & Perrins ad you are getting 12 recipes – however they are laid out with 12 buttons, and this much more fun to tap through than a list, especially because the text changes quickly using CSS + JavaScript transitions.