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

Swiper no Swiping! Content is King, and what we’ve learned at Crisp is that as we work with App developers who leverage the Swipe feature, is that we cannot count on using swipe as a gesture within advertising. If mobile devices are about vertical scrolling, the iPad is about horizontal swiping. As Swiper the Fox might say to Dora the Explorer "You'll never find it now! Ha, ha, ha!!" Note: we’ve also learned that swiping content does not load as fast as tapping for content, because Apple’s gestural technology is not smart enough to start loading at the beginning of a swipe, so quick taps onto a navigation arrow will actually perform the request to either the local file or to a server faster in every case.

Follow the Arrows Intel and HBO got dings for not offering readers a clue to find the rest of their ads. Without adding navigation buttons on the creative it would be nearly impossible for users to know that there were three panels for each of these ads. Why is that? Well because the Wired iPad app uses horizontal scrolling, they decided to offer vertical scrolling to show the rest of the ad content. Other than us reviewers of ads, will anyone else ever change their behavior to see ad content? Danger Zone

Samsung only offered a full screen in portrait, which looks bad in landscape. You have a choice here, offering a cube-sized creative in the safe zone, anything smaller than 660x660, would have saved Samsung. In the absence of the right sized creative you need to offer something different in landscape than you do in portrait. Even if it doesn’t fit the screen perfectly, it’s better to make it look like you are doing it on purpose rather than just have the wrong sized ad swirl down the whitespace well when you turn your iPad to landscape. The punchline also got lost in the rotation on the Heineken ad. Heineken gets points for having a call to action for rotation, and offering ‘can I touch’ in portrait and ‘yes you can’ in landscape. However, you cannot touch anything in the ad. Hmmf.