New white paper: Orchestrating the omnichannel customer experience

Written by Alex Klose, Head of Marketing at IMImobile.

Despite experience now being THE competitive differentiator, many businesses are still struggling to meet the expectations of today’s multi-device, always-connected consumer. Playing catch-up, they are struggling to reach the ‘bar’ set high by ecosystem disruptors such as Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook, and Uber, who are already reshaping expectations and determining what defines a ‘great’ experience from a brand.

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.

IMImobile & MMA Mobile Smart Roundtable Dinner – executive marketers discuss latest trends in delivering Smarter Mobile Engagement

As part of the Mobile Smart Roundtable Dinner Series, The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and IMImobile hosted an exclusive dinner on Tuesday, 17th February at one of London’s most sought after dinner locations, The Shard. The evening brought together executive marketers from many leading industry players including Citi Bank, Pizza Hut, Unilever, American Express, ITV, IKEA, MediaCom and Mindshare to discuss and debate the latest trends in implementing and delivering smarter mobile engagement.

With the evening providing an inspirational view across London’s night skyline, the dinner was the perfect platform for cultivating discussion. As the conversation flowed, it quickly became apparent that marketers are overwhelmed by the rapid progress of mobile technologies and proliferation of devices and datasets. With new consumer trends popping up almost every month, marketers face a relentless challenge in adapting strategies to define and measure customer engagement.

Infographic: Creativity & Rich Media in the Past Month

Welcome to the 2nd edition of Talking Mobile

Sally Harvey, Director of Membership Strategy EMEA , MMA

Welcome to the second edition of Talking Mobile, the MMA UK Blog. We hope you enjoyed last months edition, any feedback you may have would be most welcome. This week we have posts on push notifications, mobile and social change, and don’t forget to check out the education page to download presentations from the Mobile Advertising  MMA UK Training Workshop. 

The MMA UK Social – Thursday 1st May

MMA members are invited to join us at the MMA UK Social on Thursday 1st May, from 6pm until late. Sponsored by Fetch and LoopMe, this first of many MMA UK Socials and will be the perfect opportunity to meet up with friends,  network with clients and hopefully generate some new business. To register and find out more information click here. 

Written by Sally Harvey, 

Director of Membership Strategy EMEA,

MMA

Push Notifications – 5 Golden Rules

Tim Pemberton, Director of Media Operations, Yodel Mobile

The power of push messaging means a smartly managed campaigns can more than double app usage and consumer engagement with branded apps.

Despite the opportunities, many companies shy away from push, take the travel sector, it’s a prime example of a vertical under appreciating what push can do.

The team here at Yodel Mobile, conducted some research using a sample of 20 travel apps installed on our phone, to see the volume of push messages being sent over the prime Christmas season, only one push message was sent over Christmas and into early January which is when consumers are planning their travel for the year ahead. Travel as an industry is missing the boat.

Part of the reason could be caution. Get push wrong and the consumer will delete your app – an app marketing disaster. So, here are the five golden rules for getting push right…

Community + Mobile = Positive Social Change

Stephanie Griffiths, Director of International Development, Future Foundation

Mobile is making information easier to access and share, increasing transparency and empowering citizens to drive changes…from Kenya to Holland Park!

Ushahidi (“testimony” in Swahili) was a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. The original website was used to map incidents of violence and peace efforts throughout the country based on reports submitted via the web and mobile phone. Since then crowd mapping powered by mobile has helped out everywhere, from disturbances in Haiti to summer rioting in London.

Indeed the mobile revolution is right on our doorsteps, profoundly changing the way we interact at a local level. Take Love Clean Street. It helps Londoners report issues wherever they are in the capital and get them solved quickly.

Talking Mobile, a resource for MMA Members, marketers and mobile innovators

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.

The End of the ‘Water Cooler Moment’

Claire Valoti
Head of Agency Relations Facebook

Mobile has changed the way we talk about TV shows. That ‘water cooler moment’ that used to happen the day after your favourite show had aired now happens in real-time, online.  And a lot of it happens on Facebook, through mobile devices.

The fact that people talk about TV on Facebook has never been in doubt however it has often been assumed that TV-related Facebook interactions happen outside the show airing – not in real-time.  This is not the case.

The industry has also not truly understood the volumes of this chatter, since historically, we haven’t shared much information on this in the past.  Now, thanks to our new partnership with SecondSync, we will be sharing this information on an on-going basis to help clients understand how people are using Facebook to talk about topics such as TV.