4 Cs to add an edge to your mobile-friendly creatives

The first second when a viewer looks at a post while scrolling is essential. You can make the most of it by creating mobile-friendly creatives

According to a Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) report regarding Neuroscience Cognition Research, a human brain needs 4/10th of a second (400 milliseconds) to engage with mobile advertising and trigger a reaction, positive or negative. Here's how you can make the most of it.

First, let's dwell on why is it important to create mobile-friendly social media creatives:

• The MMA report suggests that ads in a mobile feed environment get attention fasters and trigger stronger cognition, compared to desktop.
• It takes about two to three seconds for two-thirds of desktop ads to be seen and cognitively recognized. On mobile, the figure is 0.4 seconds.
• Weak ads are processed faster and create a negative emotional response in less than a second. Would viewers re-engage?

Colour

The report explains how "when an ad first appears on the screen (one-tenth of a second), ads are mostly seen as a blur, but can trigger an emotional response due to color and composition". Here, the color and composition of the ad play a role as they make them stop and feel a certain emotion.

It could either be a bright, attention-grabbing creative or one with certain parts that almost jump out during a scroll. Here, the key is to make the person stop with the help of the colour and composition of the creative.

Credibility

"The cognitive process is accelerated for known brands," the report states. This effectively means that a "well-known" brand stimulates a much faster cognitive and emotional response. Use your logo as an asset to building credibility and then use that identity to get views.

Having a certain pattern to the creative can also help you increase the chances of people interacting with your content. This factor is associated with building and leveraging on the brand recall value.

Complexity

The creative's complexity should balance that of the platform. If the complexity of the platform is high, that of the creative should be low. A low complexity image is likely to work better when platform complexity is high.

An effective creative can be made by maintaining a balance between image and saliency complexities. Image complexity is determined by the number of elements and messages in the creative and saliency complexity is about the number of areas that pull attention.

All permutations and combinations have their own benefits, depending on the amount of information you wish to share. It can either be a simple picture that puts across what the brand has on offer or one that banks on the users interacting with the creativity, by say tilting the screen.

Composition

The composition of the creative can be such that viewers can be the direction to a specific spot either by concentrating the number of elements in that spot and/or by using gaze-directing techniques. Motion and human forms too work well to grab and direct attention for and within the creative.

Also Read: How to use content to create an engaged YouTube subscriber base