Consulting Skills and Frameworks

Matthew Abadie, Kelsey Alcide, Sofia Morales, Caroline Smith, Ryan Teng
The Effectiveness of Mobile Advertising on College Students
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Executive Summary
Objective: Identify what would improve the effectiveness of mobile ads among college students

Interference with what students are doing
Placement on the smartphone
Targeting
Recommendation: To increase effectiveness advertisers need to improve particularly in the following areas:
Get better data on the demographics and psychographics of people downloading different apps
Make the advertisement relevant to what application the students are using
Place ad on the top or bottom of the page, not a pop-up.

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R1: Why do college students find mobile ads annoying?R2: How effective are mobile ads in influencing shopping habits of college students?R3: What would improve the effectiveness of mobile ads? Methodology: Survey, convenience sample
Background on research method

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Smartphone ownership is wide spread

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0.6

0.2375

0.15

0.0125

Type of Phone

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Type of PhoneColumn3Column1

iPhone60%

Android23.75%

Blackberry15%

Other1.25%

To resize chart data range, drag lower right corner of range.

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Mobile ads are annoying.
Responses to the statement above:36 percent strongly agree41 percent agreed (consistent with literature review)Male vs. Female Response47 percent of females strongly agreed28 percent of males strongly agreed When rating experience with mobile ads, only 1 percent said they would love to see more.

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Top five reasons:Interruption 35%Waste of Time 12.5%Take up screen space 12%Irrelevant products 11%Other 7%
Why are mobile ads annoying?
They are annoying because they limit my productivity and interfere with my overall search query.

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Frequency and pervasiveness of advertising influences attitude towards mobile ads
6.7 percent commented on the frequency of the ads
Ads are already so prevalent on TV and the Internet. Having them on my phone too, interrupting my games gets old.

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Intrusive nature of advertising creates negative perception
Cell phones are for personal use

Used to communicate with family

Invasion of privacy

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Ads take room of an already small screen

Interrupted activities
Ads often take up the whole screen

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Targeting is not effective
10.83% of respondents found mobile ads not relevant to their needs

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Although students tend to be more tech-savvy, mobile shopping is not as prevalent as many think59% have never made a purchase on phone
Mobile shopping is not prevalent

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Items bought using mobile phone range across different categories

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90 percent of users own a smart phone, but:11 percent say ads are not relevant89 percent have never clicked on an ad
Effectiveness of mobile ads is questionable

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Applying our findings
Mobile Advertising needs to improve in many ways in order to be more effective.

Targeting: if improved, relevance will increase and users will be more likely to click on ad.Advertisers should do more research on what apps college students are downloading

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Interference: avoid having pop ups when users would find them inconvenient

Sponsorship: sponsor games instead of advertising on the gamesStudents dont mind ads if they provide a free service
Applying our findings

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Applying our findings
Relevance: if add is going to run with an app, make sure it is closely related to your product.Ex: Pandora could advertise for speakers

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Applying our findings
Big is not always best: keep ads small

vs.

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Applying our findings
Positioning: Try to put them as a banner on either the top or bottom of the page to be most efficient

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Opportunities are endless
Mobile users will increase 49.6% to 90.1 million in 2012

Forecasted to grow to 148.6 million by 2015

Smartphones sales overtook laptop sales this year

Millenials spend more time on their phones than watching TV, reading the paper, etc.

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Executive Summary
Objective: Identify what would improve the effectiveness of mobile ads amongst college students

Interference with what students are doing
Placement on the smartphone
Targeting
Recommendation: To increase effectiveness advertisers need to improve in the following areas.
Get better data on the demographics and psychographics of people downloading different apps
Make the advertisement relevant to what application the students are using
Place ad on the top or bottom of the page, not a pop-up.

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