Mobile’s big and so is video, but video ads on smartphones? Not so much. “Up until now, it’s been TV spots on the small screen, and they don’t work on mobile. They’re too long and they’re shot for a landscape view, whereas the mobile position is vertical,” says Mihael Mikek, CEO of Celtra, a digital ad creation platform.
But that’s all about to change, Mikek promises, with today’s announcement of a strategic partnership between his company and Kargo, a mobile ad exchange that merges high-volume advertisers with premium publishers. The two companies will be activating jointly created video formats that will introduce new video ad norms to small screens: mute, short (7 to 15 seconds), and vertical.
Mute, Mikek says, because the majority of play time in mobile display ads is consumed in that mode, short because mobile has dropped people’s average attention span to eight seconds, and vertical because only 2% of people (gamers excluded) use cell phones in landscape mode.
New wrinkles will appear in these made-for-mobile video ads as they gain more traction. For instance, Celtra has been working with HTML5 for the past three years and has used it to introduce interactivity into video ads. Mikek claims that Celtra clients using the short-form video ads on mobile have experienced engagement rates up to four times higher than that of conventional video.
Mikek is now eager to see how leading publishers (Hearst, NBC, and Vox are served by Kargo) will respond to mobile-ready video. “Publishers,” he says, “will be able to run fewer, shorter video ads for more money.”
