The Ad Format Shift Happening in Mobile Tech Right Now

This is a collaborative post

Mobile advertising used to be so much worse. The banner ads at the top or bottom of the screen. The desperate attempts to get you to pay attention to a display ad in the corner of your mobile app. The video ads that just took over your whole screen uninvited. All of this made mobile users incredibly adept at ignoring ads.

Now the mobile tech industry has made a change. The ad formats that advertisers and application developers that have been finding success have changed. This isn’t just technological change. This is about how users actually use their phones and what they will accept in an advertisement.

Why These Ads Stopped Working

Banner ads on mobile applications were never great. However, they worked for a long time. So long that the user base developed “banner blindness.” The click-through-rate on the ads dropped to almost zero, but marketers continued to pay for impressions that went nowhere. Thus, the tech industry began searching for alternatives.

The formats that had worked for years had become obsolete. Mobile phone users were onto such tricks.

The Full-Screen Format Gaining Popularity

One format that’s gaining popularity is the full-screen ad that interjects in between uses of an application. The best ones show up after users finish a game or read an article in a mobile news application. These interstitial ads take up the entire screen for a few seconds while users wait to get back to using the application they enjoy.

It sounds annoying and uninviting (and it can be if poorly designed) but there’s a reason many tech companies are pivoting in this direction. This type of ad shows up at a natural transition for the user. The brain is already switching tasks, so an ad that takes over for a few seconds doesn’t interrupt any flow.

To those who are trying to reach mobile users with ads, the best interstitial ads get people to engage with them more than older formats like the banner ad. The full-screen format gets people’s attention in a way that no other design can do in today’s tech climate.

Why App Developers Are Switching Too

When it comes to mobile applications, developers face the age-old challenge of trying to make money from their application without annoying their users.

Banner ads don’t pay out nearly enough for developers to do anything, so they need thousands of users beating down your door to make it worthwhile. Video ads also offer much more in payouts, but they also have the annoying potential to turn users away if the ad interrupts content they enjoy.

However, the full-screen transition ad works for everyone. They pay out more than banner ads ever did because advertisers know that people see them. They also show up at a natural transition for the user instead of interrupting a task that is essential for them to complete.

Games applications can show one after every level that players complete. News applications can show them in between articles that people read on the application. Timing is everything with these ads.

Tech startups in particular love this model. It makes money without requiring developers to have millions of users for it to work. Even the smallest of apps can make a decent amount of money from these ads if they hit the right targets.

The Impact of Mobile Gaming

Part of the reason for this huge shift in the format of mobile ads is because mobile gaming is partially responsible for it.

Game developers were the first to realize that these transition times (loading times, after-game time, menu times) are ripe for the picking. Gamers are already pausing their action, so these full-screen ads don’t interrupt their experience.

Once this change in advertisement format took off in the gaming applications, it took no time for other categories to pick it up as well. News applications, productivity applications, and even social media applications quickly adopted this format once it was proved to work in one tech sector.

What Makes This Format Work

Several things make this ad format work so well.

First, it’s practically impossible to ignore these ads. Even if users want to skip these ads, they have to look at them for a few seconds before they can carry on with their lives.

Second, the timing of these ads plays a huge role in reducing the irritation at the ad process. People hate advertisements, but many are more tolerant of them showing up at a natural transition point rather than interrupting something crucial to them.

Third, these full-screen format ads give advertisers much more space to work with than smaller formats allow. This gives them the time and space to create a well-constructed ad that people actually remember instead of being forced to read it.

The Future of Mobile Advertising

This shift towards full-screen transition ads is going on concurrently with another movement taking root in the mobile tech industry. The movement toward the idea that applications can provide a decent user experience while also making revenue for the developers who create the application.

Mobile tech companies are also becoming smarter about how they show these ads and not over-saturating the market. Most of the best applications out there only show these ads at a certain frequency and use other inventive techniques to balance making money and keeping a user base that can keep coming back again and again.

The mobile advertising space will keep changing as user behaviour shifts and new technologies emerge. But right now, the move toward full-screen formats at natural transition points represents the biggest shift the industry has seen in years. It’s working because it finally acknowledges how people actually use their phones—and respects those patterns instead of trying to force outdated formats into spaces where they don’t belong anymore.