Exactly how successful mobile advertising is has been a bone of contention for a while now, and it’s often not only the metrics that are in doubt but the interpretation of those metrics. To whit: “A new Nielsen study finds that only 10 person of the most likely candidates for mobile advertising—those using mobile devices for more than just talk, such as accessing the internet, sending text messages, playing video games or buying ringtones—responded to ads on their mobile phones. Eleven percent viewed the ads and did not respond, and a whopping 79 percent did not even view the ad” reports Advertising Age. I have two issues with this: First, most advertisers would consider a 10 percent response rate to be pretty good. Second, the fact that four out of five people not viewing the ad suggests that this doesn’t cover all forms of mobile advertising—how do you not view a banner ad, for example?

Anyway, the report goes onto suggest that relevancy is the king of advertising, noting that of the mobile-data users who did not respond to ads 53 percent said they ignored them because they were not interested in the product being advertised.