Last week Chitika, an online advertising network, released a study of mobile vs. non-mobile click through rates on their advertising units. You can read their press release about the study here.

Based on 92 million ads shown (1.3 million of them seen with mobile browsers) they reported that the desktop ads got a click through rate of 0.83%, while the “mobile ads” as a whole pulled a mere 0.48%.

I added the quotes on the words “mobile ads” because these were not mobile ads at all. Rather these were the exact same ads that were built for desktop computers but shown on mobile devices.

The conclusion drawn by Chitika and dozens of bloggers and writers who covered the story is that mobile ads don’t get the same click through response as desktop ads.

Here’s the flaw in the logic of this…

The Chitika study actually reveals that mobile users are not likely to click on desktop ads shown on their mobile device. That is an entirely different thing than saying that mobile users are not clicking on mobile ads.

These are different devices and require different strategies. You cannot simply force desktop ads onto mobile devices and then cry out that no one is clicking on them. It doesn’t make sense.

That would be like airing an audio only ad created for radio on TV and then claiming that radio ads don’t work as well as television commercials. Or like running a black and white ad designed for newspaper in a four color glossy magazine and stating that newspaper ads don’t work as well as magazine ads.

Mobile and desktop Internet use is completely different. Mobile advertising is not just desktop advertising made smaller. Mobile advertising is a different media channel than Internet advertising.

What the Chitika study really taught us is not that mobile users don’t click on ads, but that mobile users require ads specifically created for mobile use in order to click on them.

MOBILE ADVERTISING RESOURCES

Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd, Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords
(Entrepreneur Press, 2006)

You’ll find out about how AdMob got funded in a day, get Omar Hamoui’s take on the future of the mobile web and get to see an AdMob ad go live. This is the part near the end that you REALLY WANT TO SEE.

So, what did you think?

Murphy and Saint-Cast were talking about the upcoming launch of Key2Cell’s mobile advertising platform that will allow a mobile advertiser to create 7 versions of an ad campaign that correspond to the level of technology a particular phone can receive. For example, let’s say my friend and I each had signed up to receive information about a band – let’s just say Styx, for the sake of argument. (Yes, I’m an 80s music fan).

Anyway, suppose Styx wanted to send out a video to their fans but they didn’t want to upset those who were still stuck in the 80s technology-wise and couldn’t get a video. They could create 7 different versions of what they would send. My friend might get a simple text message with a link to watch the video online. I might get the video sent directly to my phone.

Slick as a whistle. This is the stuff that makes mobile marketing so exciting.

This program won’t launch until fall in Europe and 2008 in the U.S. and it is clear the target market to become advertisers is big companies. Even so, the article, titled The 7 Message Trick, is well worth reading as it is full of great insight into the mobile advertising world.