2015 MMA London Forum: Mobile Acceleration

Chris Babayode, Managing Director, MMA EMEA

This year’s MMA London Forum will focus on Mobile Acceleration and showcase brands and experts who will share first hand accounts on how mobile has played an innovative role in the brand or customer experience, in product development, and in advertising market effectiveness to transform and drive growth in their businesses.

Attendees to this year’s Forum will gain insights from marketers in retail, travel, finance, telecoms and learn how they are transforming their marketing campaigns and businesses through mobile with key takeaways to help improve your mobile capability. There’s also a glimpse into the future along with some key learning’s from a disruptor company forging a whole new sector with mobile at the heart of its business. And if you want to know how a London based product development studio built it’s business and success using mobile and gaming and the implications for brands and agencies then there’s a special session on innovation.

Selected sessions include:

• To become a mobile business marketers must embrace change, and not just in the marketing department but throughout the business. Digital transformations demand learning, recruiting, and restructuring. McDonald’s will share key insights on how to re-learn marketing not just reach, but content & context and talk about taking business mobile like you’ve never seen before.

• For ustwo, the creators of the award winning game Monument Valley the road to success has been everything but traditional. Gather insights into the impact that creative product development studios will have on brands and what will be needed in order to produce the kind of world class software and platforms that consumers will expect.

The rise of mobile: top ten discussions for the rest of 2015

Nigel Clarkson, Commercial Director, Weve

The rise and rise of mobile marketing, m-commerce and programmatic trading is continuing at a pace that we have never seen before in media.  Exciting times for all of us to be working in. So here’s a top 10 of things to discuss in mobile, some more serious than others….

1. The Plain English Society will declare war on media websites, particularly those in ‘digital’ and even more particularly in ‘ad tech’.  So many websites just have lots of words but don’t really say anything. ‘An end-to-end fully integrated data stack utilising our proprietary data system and social-integration’ doesn’t mean anything, probably not even to the poor bugger that wrote it and certainly not to any client. Say what you actually ‘do’, trust me it will help everyone. If you can’t explain it simply, you either don’t understand it yourself or you’re bull-shitting, either way, sort it out.

2. There should be a reappraisal of data assets and a push for an industry-wide analysis of data capabilities (across all digital assets not just ‘mobile’). So many businesses are cobbling-together publically available or paid-for 3^rd party data assets, all wrapped up and hidden in ‘proprietary systems’ and a load of marketing fluff to hide massive holes in accuracy. Wouldn’t it be great to really understand what the ‘value’ of that data is with a grading system that would allow a level playing field and most importantly clear choices and decisions to be made by agencies and clients based around facts not smoke and mirror marketing. That way, ‘price’ and ‘value’ could be differentiated in a much clearer fashion.

3. The emergence of data partners like Experian, Axciom, and Call Credit as genuine front-line players in the digital marketplace. They have bigger data assets than almost anyone else and have yet to engage fully in the digital market. Over the last few years, they have developed tie-ups directly into brands and other media owners, which will only be the beginning of their ambitions to interconnect the data eco-system. A DSP partnership could give them the ability to become digital planning and buying agencies at massive scale. Not a week goes by when another business isn’t announcing another data partnership with one of them.  The new data economy develops with different industry leaders potentially leading the way.

Smart Mobile Cross Marketing Effectiveness (SMoX) Study Findings

Greg Stuart, Global CEO Mobile Marketing Association

The MMA Announces Results From First-Ever Cross Marketing Effectiveness Research (SMoX) Conducted for Mobile, Based on In-Market Campaigns from Coca-Cola, Walmart, and MasterCard

Study Reveals Optimised Mobile Spend to be in the Double Digits of Total Marketing Mix

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has released the findings from its Smart Mobile Cross Marketing Effectiveness (SMoX) study. Conducted in combination with Marketing Evolution and InsightExpress, the study assessed the economic value of mobile compared to traditional marketing channels by closely examining real, in-market campaigns from Coca-Cola, Walmart, and MasterCard. According to the study, the optimal spend for mobile (based on total campaign spend) is in the double digits—far more than most marketers are currently allocating.

Results from the SMoX research confirm that marketers would significantly increase their overall campaign ROI, without increasing budget, by simply adjusting mobile spend upwards. The study also showed that mobile is a strong driver of campaign performance across the entire purchase funnel. From upper funnel metrics like awareness and image, to purchase intent and actual behavior (foot traffic or sales), the empirical evidence proves that mobile has a fervent contribution to campaign results, justifying a double-digit allocation of the entire media budget (not just digital) to mobile.

As the first comprehensive study of its kind, SMoX is expected to trigger a turning point in the mobile industry in the same way similar research drove Internet advertising in the early 2000’s. Brands that participated in those studies increased their online ad spend by 30x on average, based on the insights. Additionally, the impact to the growth of the industry, measured as a direct result of the research, was 2.2x.

“The market has acknowledged there is a deep chasm between what brands are currently spending on mobile and consumer behaviour, but now there is real, indisputable proof on the value of mobile to a brand’s business goals,” said Greg Stuart, CEO, MMA. “I believe mobile presents the greatest transformation of marketing in our generation. With empirical data, SMoX now demonstrates the competitive opportunity for those marketers who figure out how to leverage the power of mobile effectively and optimise their spending with the most impactful allocations in their marketing mix, finally keeping pace with consumers.”

Key findings include:

The Coca-Cola Company: Gold Peak Tea Campaign

• In Spring 2014, Gold Peak Tea brand was looking to build brand awareness and drive increased sales using a mix of TV, print, online, and mobile to drive messaging.
• After evaluating how effective the campaign was and how each of the various media performed, the study found that mobile drove 25 percent of top-of-mind awareness, 9 percent of “home brewed taste” image conversions, and 6 percent of sales with 5 percent of budget.

Walmart: Back-to-School Campaign

• For its annual Back-to-School campaign in the summer of 2014, Walmart was focused on driving grocery intent to shop among mothers of school-aged children.
• The study found that mobile impacted more consumers per dollar spent than both broadcast and cable TV. Mobile drove 14 percent of change in overall shopping intent, despite accounting for only 7 percent of spend.

MasterCard: Travel Card Campaign

• In Q4 2014, MasterCard launched its Travel campaign to increase association of the card within the travel sector and to drive awareness of its Concierge app.
• The SMoX study investigated the impact of mobile in the above KPIs, quantifying the value of mobile display and video as they relate to the “nester” and “empty nester” target groups. In this case, mobile worked almost twice as hard compared to the campaign average, in terms of the number of people it converted on image per dollar spent.

In conclusion, the study found that reallocating to mobile (8-16 percent of the total marketing mix, on average) would drive incremental impact for each of the campaigns, making existing budgets work harder.

In addition the study revealed the most effective ways for brands to implement various mobile tactics (including video, native, location) in order to leverage mobile to its full potential.

• Mobile video and native all performed significantly better than display.
• Different ad formats had different types of impact.
• Location targeting (retargeting and proximity) significantly improved the performance of display advertising, driving important KPI’s, including actual foot traffic.

The full SMoX report, including deeper insights and additional guidance on how marketers can use this information for their own businesses, will be available for download by attendees of the MMA’s London Forum on June 8^th.

 

Written by:

Greg Stuart,

Global CEO Mobile Marketing Association

Smartphone dominance is here; marketers must shift their approach

Robert Bridge, VP head of international marketing, Yahoo

Last month marked the 20^th anniversary of Yahoo being incorporated as a company. While it’s amazing to think how much the internet has evolved and changed in the last two decades it’s even more exciting to look forward.

User activity has shifted to mobile across the globe with users now spending more time on mobile devices than PCs.

Smartphone adoption will reach two-thirds of the global population next year. We are seeing that a computer is used to fill in the gaps on things which aren’t easy to do on a smartphone.

Developers must create efficiency and improve user experience to drive the next wave of consumers to smartphone dominance.

It is Millennials leading this charge. Although older smartphone users own the majority of devices, it is younger consumers who are far heavier users.

Flurry’s research found more than half (51%) of 13 to 17-year-olds are classed as heavy users. The 80/20 rule is in full effect, as heavier users dominate the most sessions and time spent on mobile devices.

It’s important to understand what drives smartphone dominance and what drives future users to adopt quicker. Historically the ‘app-osphere’ was a black hole for marketers, we didn’t know what users were doing inside apps, or the relationship between different apps. Of the nearly three hours users spend on mobile devices daily, 86% of that time is spent in apps – so it’s critical this is done right.

When building creatives, we must ensure to account for the rapid adoption of larger phablet devices. This will allow for more freedom in mobile messaging.

On top of this, mobile ad budgets should not be thought of in isolation. With two in five consumers crossing devices daily, siloed mobile budgets must evolve to larger cross-device buys. Native advertising in particular, is seamlessly integrated into the user experience, is the must need weapon in every marketers’ arsenal.

There should no longer be mobile-only strategies. The continuation in cross-device and dual screening means any strategy must follow a sequential process across devices with creative messaging that can live across various formats.

In the smartphone dominant era, success in digital mobile marketing will come from companies implementing a multi-pronged strategy that drives word-of-mouth and use of paid advertising, while creating opportunities through content marketing that activate app discovery.

Written by:

Robert Bridge,

VP head of international marketing, 

Yahoo