Mobile Badvertising: Nokia Music
By @edent
· advertising mobile nokia · 400 words
I've mentioned Nokia on here a few times. For a mobile focused company, they seem to have a real problem with mobile advertising.
It starts well enough with an animated GIF.
The site it links to is http://music.nokia.co.uk/ - cleverly, Nokia redirect mobile users to a specific mobile version of the site. That's where it all starts to go wrong...
Viewport Is Your Friend
This is what the user sees on visiting the advert. Better hope they've got great eyesight!
This is caused by having an obnoxiously wide graphic at the top - but also by not setting the viewport correctly.
In the <head> section of your HTML, you can define how wide the page should display. You can set the width of the page to automatically be that of the phone with this single line of code.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0;"/>
This will ensure your readers don't have to manually zoom in to read the marketing message you're trying to impart.
You can find more information about Viewport on Learn The Mobile Web.
Don't Link To Non-Mobile Sites
On this mobile website - where do you think the links lead?
Not only do they point to large pages totally unsuitable for mobile - one of the sites requires Flash to work. Thereby further excluding millions of potential customers.
It's one of the first rules of mobile advertising - don't force your customers to download megabytes of unusable data.
What Are You Trying To Do?
Finally, what's the point of this advertising campaign? 
The main purpose seems to be to get me to download content on to my PC. An odd proposition for a mobile site, surely?
Given that it can't be used by anyone without a Nokia phone - why is it being served to me?
If it is trying to entice me to buy a Nokia device so I can experience "Comes With Music" - why is it doing its best to treat me like a second class citizen?
Ask yourself this question - what are Nokia trying to acheive with this advert. Nokia's effort doesn't seem to offer any value or information for anyone. What a waste of time and money.
