Quick, you want to buy some mobile ads for your soccer team’s fundraiser and you want them to run locally. Oh, and you need to run before next weekend. To whom do you turn? Nice question, huh?
I once tried to get a quote to run mobile ads in NY State, contacting Google’s AdMob group. There was no phone number so I had to send them an email. They got back to me with a very underwhelming form letter months later. New school service.
If you want to run mobile ads these days you need experts, like a digital agency. And then you had better have a half millions dollars or they won’t take your call. Let’s not even talk about ad serving technologies, reports, and optimization of the ads.
Google.
The one company equipped to do mobile advertising for the masses is Google, via AdWords. Search is an especially important consumer need while mobile, and search is what Google does best, so why are they not launching a mobile-only version of AdWords? A version with an easy-to-use interface, from a site with DIY instructions, and offers quick turnaround?
As the mobile algorithms get smarter and more ads are served to phones unrequested, people are going to start to get mad. And that’s a bad future for mobile advertising. A good revenue future is for Google to own mobile search ads the way they do on laptops and desktops. Google needs to stop diddling around all the other stuff and open up this market. If they make it so that small businesses can buy mobile ads without needing a doctorate degree it will grow the overall market and give them an unfair share. Peace!
