Stephen Upstone
CEO & Founder of LoopMe
Talking Mobile is a resource for MMA Members, marketers and mobile innovators to discover and voice opinions around industry news, innovation and points of view. People can also find out more about the MMA UK and local activities and initiatives. If you would like to contribute please write to sally.harvey@mmaglobal.com with a clear proposal of what you would like to cover.
We are very fortunate to live and work in the greatest period of media innovation ever seen: rapid, persuasive and global. This is the mobile era and the change that we will see over the coming years will eclipse anything that we have seen before.
Dramatic change in consumers’ media habits due to the adoption of mobile smartphone and tablets create the perfect canvas to re-engineer marketing and advertising, globally, creating big winners and losers across all parts of the marketing ecosystem.
In the mobile era the MMA’s mission to make mobile marketing indispensable to marketers has never been more important.
Walmart CMO, Stephen Quinn recently claimed that success as a CMO comes from innovation, their roles have evolved and the job title should really be Chief Innovation Officer. According to Gartner, CMOs will spend more on technology than CIOs by 2017, with stronger growth coming from marketing budgets growing around twice as fast as IT budgets today (9% versus 4.7%).
We check our smartphones up to 150 times each day according to Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins. Google research shows that 65% of online searches start on a smartphone, and mobile plays an ever-increasing role in the path to purchase in store with 57% of shoppers using their smartphones in store according to e-consultancy.
There is no medium that can take brands closer to consumers than mobile. Large technology companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter describe themselves as mobile companies. We have just seen a significant acquisition of mobile-only WhatsApp for $19bn by Facebook. Whilst the financial wisdom of the acquisition still has to play out, it is clear that the mobile first approach of WhatsApp managed to reach and connect with 430 million monthly users in 4 years. That is more monthly active users than the users of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Skype combined, in just 4 years.
In this same era, Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed recently said that “Mobile is going to have a bigger impact than the Internet had. The internet shook us all up. I think that mobile is going to shake us up all the more.”
To help marketers to understand and drive value from the opportunities presented, the MMA runs events and manages committees around the world where industry players come together to educate, debate innovation and measurably grow the impact of mobile marketing results. Additionally, the MMA provides global information resources such as white papers and case studies which can be found at http://www.mmaglobal.com.
I would like to thank Theo Theodorou of Videology and Claire Valoti of Facebook, the authors of the first articles for Talking Mobile for their contribution. Both articles discuss links between mobile devices and the current heavyweight of brand advertising, the Television.
This theme picks up nicely from our last Brand and Agency Briefing held in November 2014 where Tess Alps of Thinkbox, Gareth Capon of Sky, Jon Block of ITV and Andrew French of Somo presented data, case studies, experience and strategies for taking advantage of the links between mobile devices and the television set.
I look forward to seeing you at our next event in London. Our training session for marketers on 27/03/2014 or at our next Brand and Agency Briefings in June where marketers will be asked to present on strategies and ROI from brand advertising on mobile.
Please do enjoy the blog and do let us know how you would like to contribute!
Written by
Stephen Upstone
CEO & Founder of LoopMe
Chair of MMA UK
MMA UK Blog 