Mobile First – Plan > Tech > Create

Chris Minas Co-Founder and Managing Director Nimbletank

The days of adding technology and digital on to the end of a Marketing or advertising campaign are, thankfully, numbered. Strategists and planners are thinking about the vast array of possibilities with mobile technology as a key component from the moment they receive the brief, enabling the creative team to execute innovative campaigns.

Technology First, Mobile double first

In days gone by, Planners, Strategists or Media Planners, I should say, have been key to encouraging, persuading or manipulating an audience to take some sort of action whilst also ensuring that marketing performance and business objectives were met. They achieved this through the strategic positioning of artwork and media placed throughout the various channels available to them.

The worlds of branding, as well as media placement have moved relatively slowly over the years. It has taken over two hundred years to evolve advertising from shipping crates (circa 1800’s), to the creation of visual brands and logos (circa 1928), where its rumored that Sandeman Port brewery company, hired an artist to create a visual identity.

Advertising has moved comparatively quickly over the last fifty years, developing into the global industry we all know and love, across OOH, print, radio and television broadcast. Across these traditional channels it has always been crucial to be inventive, innovative and competitive in order to be noticed.

Circa 1998 digital was introduced into the marketing mix and consequently took off. Although digital has been a huge part of the marketing strategy, it has usually been an afterthought to the overarching advertising campaign. At this point the desktop was the tool of choice for digital, and we often heard “Let’s build a website to support the campaign”. In 2007 smartphones were introduced and the desktop become the mobile. The digital afterthought then moved onto “Let’s build an app”. Next up will no doubt be the smart watch.

Ready, Aim, Track – Mastering the Mobile World

Elizabeth D’Arcy-Potts – Sales Director, Europe at CAKE

 

We all know that as consumers spend more time on mobile devices, it would make sense for advertisers to spend more on mobile advertising. However, statistics show that increases in mobile advertising spending are not keeping up with total media usage.

Mary Meeker’s 2014 Internet Trends Report states that consumers spend 20% of their total media time on mobile devices, but advertisers only spend 4% of their total budget on mobile advertising. The same report reveals consumers spend just 5% of their total media time looking at printed items, but advertisers continue to spend 19% of their advertising budget on print advertising. It is clear that advertisers should adjust their spend to better align with actual media usage, but care must be taken when increasing digital ads as consumers can be easily irritated if they receive too many.

Get Ready…

Make it Meaningful

Advertisers can easily push more sales promotions and engagement campaigns to customers’ mobile devices, but care should be taken to communicate with consumers in a way that is actually meaningful for their mobile experience – not distracting, intrusive or irrelevant.

Go Responsive

With mobile device usage so high, advertisers should also ensure their sites are viewable on mobile devices. Unfortunately, advertisers continue to take mild action on mobile site responsiveness with only 11% of the UK’s top 100 brands finishing 2013 with a responsive site, according to the IAB’s Mobile Optimised Site study.

How getting mobile right is key to getting media right

Duncan Southgate, Global Brand Director – Digital, Millward Brown

The power of mobile is undoubted; it is not just a new advertising medium, but a potential communication channel that travels with consumers wherever they go and has the power to transform the overall media mix. But with power comes responsibility, the responsibility to connect wisely and respectfully with consumers.

So while Millward Brown have identified the need to ensure that every brand touch point exploits the possibilities of a mobile response channel as one of our key Digital and Media Predictions for 2015, this comes with caveats. Mobiles are very personal devices so mobile marketing should be deployed with care. Brands can engage consumers via many different approaches (ads, apps, QR Codes, NFC chips, audio recognition, beacons etc.), but what’s important is that they connect in some meaningful, inspiring creative way.

The danger for mobile as a medium is that it oversteps the mark and is considered too intrusive – that won’t offer a long-term basis for success. So while it is now possible to alert consumers because they are near retail outlets for example, that is unlikely to work well unless consumers are coached on how and why the alerts are being generated, and delighted by the results.

Ultimately, the technology is secondary to the need to identify a quality connection – by time, mood or location for example. Indeed brands will very likely need to vary the mechanism by location using beacons in shops and QR codes or hashtags in traditional media, for example. Location offers huge opportunities but only if you really think about what people want in a given location. Mobile marketing should not be seen as a stalking device but a way for marketers to build a greater understanding and empathy with their target audience.

Integration with other media is also critical. Research conducted by Millward Brown into the winners of the MMA’s Smarties awards in APAC found that 80% of the winners had a clear, well-defined role for mobile in an integrated campaign. Eighty-six percent of the winners used a multiple channel strategy.

Finding the perfect match: What to look for in a technology partner

Chris Le May, Country Manager UK & Nordics at DataXu

Consumers don’t stick to one channel, so your marketing shouldn’t either. Although mobile is taking a larger chunk of advertising budgets each quarter, it’s often still looked at in isolation. In this increasingly connected world it becomes essential though that marketers understand the whole customer journey and adapt the way they engage with their target audience accordingly. By using a programmatic approach to marketing, advertisers can better engage with prospects and customers, understand their path to purchase, optimise content, develop better buying strategies and glean actionable insights.

The first, and maybe the hardest, step to implementing an omni-channel programmatic marketing strategy is to find the right partner. Here we’ve listed five characteristics to look for.

 

Figure 1: Essential Partner Capabilities

 

1. Engage customers throughout their customer journey

The mobile phone is a consumer’s most personal device. Recent Ofcom statistics show that 62% of UK adults own a smartphone and a third of mobile users make purchases on their device. So what role does mobile play in the path to purchase? Working with an omni-channel programmatic platform helps marketers answer this question and more. Your technology partner should be able to measure which channels, in which sequence and with which creative messages were most effective. These real time insights can then be used to inform future campaigns.

2. Activate data across an entire media plan

Mobile is a significant part of any modern marketer’s media plan and huge volumes of mobile and tablet inventory, alongside display, rich media, video and social media are available to buy in real time. There are different ways of accessing this inventory and your programmatic partner should be able to not only execute your open exchange buys, but also your private exchange and ‘direct’ buys. Find a platform that offers buyer controls to let you define inventory quality so that you only purchase inventory that meets your criteria.

Good retail weather and m-commerce ramp up Christmas fashion sales

David Bird, Insights Analyst – Weather Channel Global Media Ltd

A number of clothing retailers have already reported their Christmas results for 2014. Two key themes so far have emerged: the first is that the clothing sector picked up during the festive period, sales for many were over and above those of the previous year. Secondly, the growing importance of multi-channel retail at Christmas.

Weather created opportunities for UK retailers at Christmas

The mild and sunny weather over December was generally very conducive to the retail market at

Christmas, across all sectors. These are the weather conditions which are generally favourable for

driving footfall into stores, and they also keep consumer heating and fuel bills low, freeing up

discretionary spend. Moreover, continued low interest rates in the UK and low fuel prices over the

Yuletide period created an “additional tail wind”.

A generally mild, sunny, if wet, Christmas

Over most of December the weather came from the west, from the Atlantic, and UK temperatures were milder (0.5 degrees Celsius) than the seasonal average (4.4 degree Celsius). Moreover, sunshine was well above the norm, indeed it was the second sunniest December since 1929. Why is this important? Well, Nielsen estimates that 20 per cent of all Christmas spending is done in the final two weeks before Christmas, and above average temperatures and sunny weather means shoppers head out and about.