(Source: ello.co)

What an interesting place for Google to be in. With advertising revenue as their profit-center, it seems to make more financial sense to lose people to iPhone than to allow large-scale adblocking. But there are a few things I think we need to think about before abandoning the “Great White Hope” of mobile advertising. 

Large-scale, data-hogging, mobile UX-unfriendly ads are terrible. There has to be a way to uniformly integrate ads into mobile content blocks like OG banner ads that ultimately get ignored. I understand that ad-servers can charge a premium for interactive units but I would imagine that those units do more harm than general brand awareness.

I like the model of engaging with an ad (like watching a video) to access “premium” content or features. Whether you actually watch the video or let the counter run down while you do something else, that level of engagement is usually worth it to access content you’d normally have to pay for. 

The most important thing is decidedly lacking from this article, however. Why can’t we just create cool ad experiences for mobile? I still like the idea of interstitial games - though I’m sure there utility has been debunked by some research study. They’re probably data-hungry but I doubt that they’ll stay that way. If we can design ways for people to interact with ad content, isn’t that more interesting and impactful than serving up banner ads in a smaller format?