Mobile Marketing Mistakes With Print Ads

The mobile web's growth has understandably taken people by surprise. Including, frankly, some who should know better.

Imagine you are creating a marketing campaign for a large brand, designed to encourage bored commuters standing around a train station to visit a web site. It makes sense that site should be well optimized for smartphones. Right?

We're based in San Francisco, whose public transit system generates revenue from display ads at bus stops and in train stations. For the most part, these ads are visually beautiful, and of outstanding quality. You can tell a lot of expert care and preparation went into them.

Here is a "floor ad", promoting the Asus Bamboo laptop. Its large size (about six feet square), novel underfoot placement, and vivid visuals really reach out and grab attention.

Asus Bamboo Floor Ad

Notice the 2-D barcode in the lower left:

Asus Bamboo 2D barcode

In case you're not familiar with it yet, this kind of graphic actually encodes a web page address. You can snap a picture of it with your phone's camera. When your phone "reads" the image, it knows to automatically open up its web browser to a specific web address - in this case, www.asusbamboo.com.

Now, think about this a moment. This barcode is ONLY going to be read on mobile phones. No one walking by is going to stop, boot up their laptop, install barcode reading software, and point their webcam at this image to see where it will take them in their browser.

Considering that, doesn't it make sense that the target website be extremely well optimized for mobile phones?

Sadly, it's not. Here is what it looks like on an iPhone 3GS:

asusbamboo.com on an iPhone 3GS

You can read the headline and the "Asus" logo, and see the image of the laptop. Almost everything else important on that mobile screen is unreadable or unusable. All that carefully crafted sales copy is too small to read. The social media sharing buttons on the top left are so absolutely tiny, even at high magnification, that anyone with adult-sized fingers will have trouble selecting them on a touch phone.

Even the "BUY NOW" button is so small, in a field of empty unused space, that it's not just hard to read. It's hard to notice. (Can you find it?) Isn't that the point of this entire venture? To get people to "buy now"?

Another recent example is Blackberry. They produced a really well done print ad campaign with extensive public transit advertising, promoting the Blackberry Messenger Service. Here's one print ad that covered a train station wall:

Blackberry Messenger ad in SF train station

Notice the website address in the lower right, which is fairly prominent when seen in person:

Blackbery BBM ad web address

I saw over a dozen variants of this ad with different copy and designs. Every single one had the same call to action in the form of the blackberry.com/bbm web address. If these ad campaigns had any direct response intention behind them at all, it was to get people to go to that website while they were standing there, waiting for the bus.

So how does this page look on mobile? They did a little better: it at least provides a good mobile web design on the Blackberry phones I tested. I imagine someone would have lost their job if that were not the case.

But right now, Blackberry has a minority of mobile web usage, overshadowed by both iPhone and Android in North America. If someone were to type in www.blackberry.com/bbm on their iPhone or Android phone, isn't that person an obviously excellent prospect for RIM (the makers of Blackberry), ripe for conversion to their platform? In fact, shouldn't that be the primary purpose of this ad campaign? Selling Blackberry to current Blackberry owners needs to be secondary, to say the least.

So what do visitors using the iPhone or any Android phone actually see? Something like this:

www.blackberry.com/bbm on an iPhone

Sure, that's a nice enough picture of the tough guy up top. Virtually nothing else works on this page, though, from either a mobile web design perspective, or a sales perspective.

Some people might think the prospect can just zoom in on their phone. This doesn't work well for several reasons. First, many phones make zooming awkward or inconvenient. More importantly, even if you zoom in to magnify, the reader has to repeatedly scroll right and left to read the long sentences, making it easy to miss important elements (like the Asus' "BUY NOW" button). It's like looking at a beautiful painting, on a large canvas... through a tiny porthole.

Overall, these ad campaigns by Asus and RIM were very well done, with marketing insight and excellent visuals. It's too bad they missed the single important last step. The good news is that we can all learn from it. If your business does large print advertising, consider whether you need a mobile optimized website. You can even ask us for advice.