Tesco using click-to-call mobile ads in the UK - mobile advertising going mainstream

Tesco is the biggest supermarket in the UK and the world's third largest retailer in the world. When they start using mobile marketing you know that things are really happening.  Anyway, I noticed that they have begun to start serving ads on admob using a click to call format - advertising their financial products.  This is really fantastic for the mobile ad market for a number of reasons:

• Tesco is a mainstream business not a mobile content company - which means that mobile advertising is starting to get budgets from a range of new sectors
• Tesco spends huge amounts of money each year on advertising - it will have a big impact on the mobile ad market if they start to shift spend onto the platform
• Tesco are clearly seeing mobile as a direct-response ad medium - the fact that they are using click-to-call suggests that mobile can drive sales effectively just like online search ads

Here is a screenshot of the ad on the mjelly mobile site - Tesco are using a mixture of text and text + banners with clear calls to action:

Once you click on the ad you go through to a landing page.  I did notice that they are not really varying the landing page for the different ad creative - you see the same page whether you have clicked on an insurance or credit card ad.  This is something they should look to improve if they want to get the best conversions possible.

Once you click through from the landing page you are taken to a click to call page which allows you to fire up a telephone call via a graphical button. 

This campaign is great news for mobile - let us know if you see anything similar out there.

Comments

[yonyaninja]

Next step would be mobile casino games advertising.