As far as I am concerned, BlackBerry is doing it all wrong in the way they run ads on their Messenger app, the BBM. I believe this is a move that is more destructive than helpful to advertisers. If there is a rule book on how not to advertise, folks at Blackberry have not read it.
Good advertising like the ones run by Facebook, Google and Twitter run are well targeted in such a way that you see ads relevant to your interests. For Facebook, they gather the excess information their users gladly share on their service to figure out what their users are interested in. These interests are made available to advertisers who can target specific demographics.
For instance, a hotelier whose establishment is looking for new customers can target Facebook users coming into the city where the hotel is located, and so on. With Google, the search giant uses keywords shared via email, pages visited via its Chrome browser, terms searched for and numerous other factors to find the right products to market to its users via ads.
With Blackberry, it is doubtful if there is such an algorithm in place as users get the most random of adverts right in their Channel feed which were originally used for checking on friends’ activities. To make it worse, the technology behind the ad placement is so flawed that when a user tries to click another item on the channel feed, the ad jumps to the middle of the screen leading to a click in error. The frustration when trying to backtrack so one can click on the originally intended item does another disservice to the advertiser.
Another annoying feature is how adverts come in as friend requests. It is annoying to see a notification for a request in-app, just to discover it is another brand looking for attention that one never intended to give in the first place. If there was one place such recommendations to follow a brand should be, then it should have been placed on the Channels feed with the other annoying sponsored content (take a cue from Twitter).
With a price tag of $1000 a day to feature channels and a minimum budget of $2000 to run a campaign, BBM Ads should be able to provide meaningful content to end users instead of spamming with random content. Personally, I have not been able to see an ad from a brand that I was interested in – and I am not even an anti-ad person. This is why I strongly believe that BlackBerry has a lot to work on to make BBM advertising as useful as its contemporaries in the ecosystem.
