Does any consumer ever want to see advertisements? Probably not, unless they promise a good deal. Largely, though, it is something the average consumer puts up with, more because it is unavoidable, and grudgingly, as it subsidises the cost of services that will otherwise be more expensive.

Mobile ads can seem more of a nuisance – device use is all fingers and thumbs, pun unintended, so if you inadvertently click on one, you can never seem to get rid of it. You often cannot be sure which is an ad and which the piece of information you want to read, and it seems to stalk the user long after she has looked for a piece of information …

Advertising, in whose interest it is to endear itself to users, thus succeeds so spectacularly in putting them off. Into this scenario comes Miip, a product by Bangalore-based mobile ad technology firm inMobi, which promises to put the user at the centre of the effort. Miip is being described as a discovery platform that transforms advertising into ‘moments of discovery’ for users.

What this means is that the user will see information that will be personalised and useful whenever she uses an app. For instance, a user who likes rock music will see recommendations for merchandise, reviews, concert tickets, music equipment or trending rock collections, all within native apps. This will include a buy button so that she can finish the transaction on the same device.

User-centric At the high-profile launch of Miip last week in San Francisco, attended by Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs, Naveen Tewari, Founder and CEO, inMobi, said ads today have forgotten “the protagonist of the story” – the user, concentrating instead on the advertiser and the publisher – and that Miip will humanise the experience of mobile advertising. It will glean and refine its recommendations over time through the consumer’s reactions and emotions in the area she is exploring – the discovery zone. Tewari described advertising as “a $600-billion industry thriving on practices users don’t like”. Content has reshaped itself to users’ needs but advertising has not.

With a quarter of the world’s population likely to have smartphones by 2016, and many businesses increasingly going the app-only way, moves such as this are an imperative for all those who have a stake in this business.

People spend about 30 per cent of time on these devices, on which there is a lot of content and “content snacking”. It is apps and social media feeds on mobile devices that are delivering information and entertainment. Miip will be housed in apps and will extract content from them and circulate it within the discovery zone. It is currently in private beta with several partner apps and will be available over the next few months. Tewari expects it to make about $1 billion for inMobi in the next couple of years.

Of context and conversion Then there are other problems for advertisers. Conversion to sale is one. Cristina Cordova, who leads business development at Stripe, inMobi’s payment solutions partner, says that while mobile internet traffic outpaces desktop traffic, conversions are a fraction of it. The buying experience on a mobile device is poor – the design of the web site may not be optimised to the device, the screen size is a deterrent compared to a personal computer, network speed is often a problem. “Easy checkout is essential to conversions,” said Cordova.

Context is another bugbear. Where are the shoppers/seekers coming from? Are they just looking or do they intend to finish the transaction? How many of the diverse things they are looking for are with a serious intent to purchase? How does one target them? What is their device use saying?

Context-switching customers make it incredibly hard for e-commerce to understand customers. “Price comparison and product research require a lot of investment, and us retailers need to be able to do this on a very large scale. Mobile for retail is still very nascent but the opportunity is massive. Miip enables reading customers in the context they are in,” said Nikhil Raj, vice-president at Walmart eCommerce, at the launch.

Wouldn’t Miip, despite being curated and in-context as it claims to be, still be an interruption? “Well, that’s the aim – not to be one. The Miip spot arrives only when it knows a few things about you,” says Amit Deshpande, Director, UX Design and UI Engineering.

What next? Says Jessie Paul, CEO of Paul Writer Strategic Advisory: “People find value in ads, despite their being intrusive. If you are on apps, which mostly have something to sell, you are there to buy and to that extent, people will be interested. This product has a lot of potential but after that, what else? Today’s big e-commerce is about five years old, and was all website-based. Now it’s all app-based, and might be replaced by some other technology later.” She points out that there is a limit to the number of apps people will and can download.

“Miip has the potential to enable decision-making, and we think that is what users are seeking,” adds Deshpande. The average mobile user looks at the mobile 150 times a day, most of it to check notifications – and swipes them off, to ignore or deal with later. Facebook and Google claim 20 per cent of our attention. The rest is on games, productivity and apps which could be inMobi’s prospective partners. Can we create something that people look at?”

(The writer attended the launch of Miip in San Francisco at the invitation of inMobi.)

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