Talk to any marketing professional these days and the hype is all around native ads. People, especially millennials, have gotten so good at detecting and tuning out advertising that 100% of your marketing dollars can be flicked away with the swipe of a screen. Not an exaggeration: I can’t remember the last time I’ve acknowledged an ad, especially digital. If I visit a mobile site and am greeted with a click through ad or sign up form, I quickly swipe left to get back to the familiar territory of Google. Information overload, combined with the ease of tapping away, makes it a futile endeavor to get to millennials via traditional advertising. So how do we get to millennials?Studies show millennials are most responsive to three categories of marketing: word of mouth, branding, and native ads. For the sake of this blog post we will be focusing on the lattermost of those three. Native advertising is the best way to get in front of millennials for one simple reason: they don’t immediately detect that you are advertising to them. Native ads slyly limbo under their “This Person Wants To Sell Me Something” detector. So now you are probably asking, how does this translate to mobile?Native app preloads are the latest innovation in mobile advertising. Native app preloads allow you to bypass the natural inclination to “tune out” and enter the subconscious by putting your brand at the forefront of people’s everyday experience: the smartphone home screen. Consider this: your average cellphone user age 18-24 checks his or her phone 74 times per day. Multiply that by an 18-month life cycle (the average duration of smartphone ownership) and you come out with close to 40,000 unlocks. There are few better ways to enter the subconscious decision making process of the millennial consumer.Let’s face it, traditional advertising is going the way of the dodo. With native app preloads, you’re raising brand awareness and granting yourself “legitimacy” to young smartphone users; almost like having a verified check on Twitter. Then they open your app, it’s awesome, and word of mouth takes care of the rest… That is the power of the preload.
