?It's really important to think beyond the 320x50 banner to provide value for advertisers as well as delivering a great user experience,? said Lolly Mason, head of publisher development for Europe, the Middle East and Africa with Celtra.

?Users actually like interacting with new and interesting formats.? 

The publisher will offer Celtra?s Reactive Pull ad format to advertisers, under a three-month partnership deal piloted with the jewelry store brand across Hearst?s Cosmopolitan and Red magazines. 

The results point to the importance of underpinning a mobile campaign with creativity to provide value for brand advertisers.

The video-consumption surge implies that the video experience within the format is more engaging for users than within expandable banner campaigns.

Besides Cosmopolitan and Red, consumers also can see the programmatic-friendly ads on Hearst?s Digital Spy and Elle magazines.

The Reactive Pull format takes a premium top-of-the-page placement just below the publisher's menu bar and offers a way to interact with the banner.  

It invites the user to pull the screen down to reveal the ad content with a reactive scale and cross-fade effect. 

After viewing, a swipe gesture simply dismisses the ad.  

A range of interactive ad features can be incorporated into the expanded ad unit, such as swipeable galleries, video, animation or dynamic content.  

 

Hearst decided to deploy Reactive Pull after seeing growing demand for ad formats that give advertisers a larger space within which to communicate their message.

 

It is the first in a series of Celtra mobile formats that Hearst is embedding into its product offering to help advertisers and agencies achieve their performance targets and creative ambitions, Rob Wilkin, head of commercial product for Hearst Magazines UK, said in a release. 

 

Caitlin Steele, online marketing manager for Pandora Jewelers, said the format provided a satisfying native user experience by adapting to the look and feel of the entire page, boosting customer engagement.

 

The use of native advertising on mobile is growing as it provides a more seamless experience than banner ads, which can be disruptive for users. While it is still early day for native advertising, early learnings suggest that users find native ads more appealing and less intrusive. 

For instance, in April, as an unusually cold winter wound down, Home Depot shrewdly used mobile to reach consumers? whose minds were turning to home improvement projects with native ads while simultaneously experimenting with the effectiveness of deep links. 

Two ads appeared in the mobile news feed on Huffington Post, one promoting a limited-time offer on carpet home installation services and the other, products for refreshing cabinets and bathrooms. Tapping through on the former brought users directly to a mobile-friendly page on the Home Depot site listing carpeting products available at a nearby store while the latter linked to the site?s home page.

Reactive Pull points to the importance of delivering value to users while enabling brands to deliver the right message to the right user across all screens.

?An exciting format already brings you half way there,? Ms. Mason said. ?If you then combine this with data and the wonders of HTML5 to offer 'programmatic creative' ? dynamically changing creatives that ensure you're showing the right message to the right user in a compelling way ? you're onto a winning formula.?