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Minimalist mobile ads perform better in the US: report

While ads with bright colors fared better in countries such as Nicaragua, Kenya and India, more minimalist ads saw higher success in countries including the United States, Singapore and Denmark, according to a new report from Todacell. 

The study reveals how color impacts ad campaigns on mobile devices. The findings indicate countries with lower GDP per capita respond better to multi-colored, bright ads, while regions with higher GDP per capita prefer ads with minimalist color and design.

?When I got the results of the research and the performance results, I was very surprised to see that after such a long research, over 2 months, the findings make a lot of sense and are directly related to the culture of the consumers in the various countries,? said Amir Goldstein, CEO of Todacell. ?To me, this research shows that mobile marketers should leave no stone unturned when they consider which campaign data points should be analyzed and optimized.

?Every campaign data point must be analyzed and optimized because one never knows from where the next 10-15 percent improvement in ROI or other campaign performance metric will come.?

Color-specific campaigns
Todacell ran a host of mathematical and computational algorithms to establish the relationships between countries? GDP statistics and the performance of mobile ad campaigns. 

The study reported that countries with middle-level GDP per capita, such as Brazil and Russia, saw both of types of display ads perform equally well.

The ad network?s data scientists sought to identify common mobile ad targeting parameters, such as type of mobile device, geographic location, and operating system. However, only performance data analyzed in accordance with GDP percentages yielded reasons behind performance gaps.

The number and brightness of colors within ads, in addition to shades and grades of specific colors, heavily impact performance.

Scientists also determined that ads see higher user engagement if at least one or two colors appear in several different shades on ad, rather than displaying different one shade of each different color.

Results for marketers
The results from the study indicate that ad engagement is heavily driven by culture in addition to income. In Africa, traditional clothing is typically made in bright colors that each have meaning, suggesting that African consumers might subconsciously associate certain colors in ads with various meanings.

?On a micro-level, the big news for marketers is that color has an impact beyond what was traditionally thought,? said Mr. Goldstein. ?There have always been colors used for food, or when targeting younger consumers or when marketing high end products. But now we discovered that it is not only the color itself, but in different markets with different GDP per capita, the consumer reaction to the ad is also based upon the colorfulness of the ad.?

Todacell reported that marketers should aim to design differentiated graphics for different markets in order to attain better results. The company experienced an increase of up to 50 percent more ROI after adjusting ad campaign colors in accordance with preferences revealed by countries? GDP per capita.

?On the macro-level, the big news for marketers is that every single data point in a marketing campaign must be analyzed and optimized,? Mr. Goldstein said. ?It's not enough to analyze the immediate data we have like bidding, segments, publishers and dayparts as we do with programmatic buying, we need to extend the scope of the programmatic algorithms and analyze and optimize every data point.

?To us, this means that mobile marketers need to invest in technology and algorithms to analyze and optimize all available data points. That's how we're going to improve mobile marketing performance.?

Final Take
Alex Samuely is an editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York