Branding On Mobile Is Tricky: InSkin Media CCO

Businessman using mobile phone wearing carton box on head
Emma Mackenzie
By Emma Mackenzie



The small screens of smartphones makes brand messaging difficult, believes Steve Doyle, the chief commercial officer at online and video advertising company InSkin Media.

For a company that focuses on rich media, home-page take overs with large brand messaging, creating the branding messaging for a mobile device (excluding tablets) is a tough nut to crack, which is one reason the company doesn’t play much in the mobile space.

“Branding on mobile is a tricky one,” Doyle told B&T. “Whilst a lot of traffic is going there, while a lot of ad spend is going there and a lot of clients are focusing on it, and they absolutely should be, but I think the branding in mobile place is a challenge.

“What can do you do on a mobile phone today with ad tech? serve them a banner and make creative come out of it – but at the end of the day it’s still a banner – or you can put an interstitial in front of it which is where you’re taking over the page and interrupting the user’s journey – neither of which I would put down as great banner experiences.

“Our philosophy is about user experience and making it easy for the user, making it easy for the publisher and the advertiser, because at the end of the day we sit between all of those and we keep everybody happy.

“Mobile will be huge, but I think for brand advertisers mobile still faces a challenge.”

Branding is what InSkin Media does best, and the Aussie general manager Matthew Newcomb recently squashed the notion you can’t build brands online.

“We’d like to see more discussion on the value of online branding,” said Newcomb. “So many marketers just see click though rate as the metric for whether their campaign has been any good or not.

“We want to talk about how people have engaged with that piece of marketing communication, how much time they’ve spent with a brand, what impact it’s had.

“When you think about all the sight, sound, motion…the amazing creative that you can build, the amount of space you’ve got to play with – some people still think you can’t build brands online. It’s a total fallacy. Of course you can, and you should.”




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