Mobile@DMEXCO – Second screen, first choice

Dominik Matyka, Chief Advisor
DMEXCO – Digital Marketing Expo & Conference

These days, about two in every three people around the world use some form of mobile phone, and around four in every five of those devices are smartphones. (Source: Digital 2022 July Global Statshot Report) Since the end of 2018, mobile phones have accounted for more than half of the world’s “connected time” – and that share continues to increase. The latest GWI data indicates that mobile phones – previously our second screens – now account for 55.5 percent of the time we spend online, compared with 52 percent in the past year. My personal figure is likely to top 75 percent.

Mobile Internet is the key to smart homes, remote working, and augmented & mixed reality, so you don’t need a crystal ball to understand that it will be the dominant Internet channel in the future. Mobile Internet has also unlocked the rapid growth in advertising revenue from channels such as Instagram and TikTok. Ads now fill the majority of the timeline on these apps and deliver social commerce with no media discontinuity whatsoever.

Cannes Lions Roars Back

After a two-year hiatus, Cannes Lions came roaring back in a way that was more emotional than I would have ever anticipated possible.  Sure, all of the business that needed to be transacted was, there were innumerable speeches, fireside chats and panels, those who wanted to could dance the night away on the Plages teeming with Brigadoon like platform hospitality installations, each one more impressive than the next and, of course, the coveted Cannes Lions were handed out for the very best work across a litany of categories to the delight of the recipients.  

DMEXCO 2020 – Attitude Matters with Remote Matchmaking in a Pandemic

Dr. Dominik Matyka, Chief Advisor DMEXCO

Never before has attitude been more important than this year, as industries, disrupted by the corona virus struggle between economic and human survival from a home office. Remote working and social contact through digital interfaces has become the new normal. Events in the Corona crisis, such as the #StopHateforProfit initiative involving Facebook, Coca-Cola, Unilever amongst other corporates highlight a need for the digital industry to have a clear attitude. In line with our ‘Attitude Matters‘ motto, we have published a DMEXCO report  featuring a comprehensive study on the topic of attitude. An overwhelming majority (89 percent) believe that companies have a responsibility to solve societal challenges and over half (54 percent) believe that there will probably not be a return to business as usual.

At DMEXCO, we have digitized at speed to create the brand new platform DMEXCO @home  to take the leading conference, fair and European networking hub for the business of the future fully virtual. After months of lock down and uncertainty, we are looking forward to hosting an intensive exchange with our colleagues, industry experts, our community and new visitors on September 23 and 24 from wherever they are in the world, via desktop or mobile screen.

Like many working teams, we are in a pandemic white space and have had a great deal of interest from our community on how it will work, particularly with the unique networking and social interaction functions. These two functions have been at the core of our development of the digital platform and we want to let our visitors know what to expect. With a design, reminiscent of social media interfaces, there will be several matchmaking possibilities on the platform:

• platform-wide there will be interactive contact suggestions via a free text search in the Communications Center;
• via a ‘Discovery Graph’, a Snap Map style visualization of the community with a filter function so that a visitor can search for contacts according to their business needs;
• with a click on an interactive ‘Brandcard’ located in the ‘Show floor’, a visitor can enter a virtual exhibitor space, manned by a team of contact persons and click on an interactive exhibitor profile (green signals that a team member is online and available);
• a visitor can make group video calls with up to 10 people, communicate via a messenger function or via a schedule-a-meeting feature.

Every visitor can create their own profile, entering their area of interest, company, position etc. We, as humans, need physical social contact but it could be much easier to search for contacts online with a filtered search function, than through a physical anonymous crowd. Europe is at the global forefront of GDPR regulation and each matchmaking possibility on the DMEXCO @home platform will be preempted by an ‘opt in’ function for personal consent to ensure privacy.

In the mobile marketing world, an industry central to DMEXCO @home consumer concerns for privacy have been a barrier to uptake of some new technologies, for example, location based marketing. Aside from Generation Z, comfortable with using apps that track their whereabouts on their mobile phone, most consumers are reluctant to broadcast their location and movements. This attitude, despite de-identification technology, has hindered the development of location based marketing in the mobile marketing sphere. In this strange world of today, consumers now have a strong health incentive to allow bluetooth low energy to be activated on their smartphone and use the Corona warning apps. Again GDPR compliant in Europe, the government promise of anonymity is a key driver to consumer uptake. Will Corona disruption cause long term changes in consumer behavior and drive location based marketing forward?

Nobody can predict precisely how long Corona will disrupt or what the long term impact will be. Today, there has been a huge global shift to relying on digital technology and experimentation. In April, a survey revealed that our DMEXCO Community believes that in the longer term, the pace of digital transformation will accelerate. With these opportunities, come digital corporate responsibility and the right attitude. Foursquare, who will be speaking at DMEXCO @home , have committed the company’s tech with a distributed team of volunteer technologists, to helping in pandemic times and are sharing aggregated and anonymized foot traffic data from across the USA with health authorities. Snap, an important player in mobile social media and speaker at DMEXCO @home, after its research revealed that anxiety was high amongst its users, has rolled out a mini app with partner meditation app Headspace. Who would have predicted that Apple would cooperate with Google? At DMEXCO, we may have this year been relieved of carbon offsetting our business travel with our DMEXCO forest initiative but green pressure is here to stay and will affect all industries. Not every company will have the same attitude but having an attitude on how brands can drive societal innovation and take digital responsibility is business relevant.

With DMEXCO @home we are looking forward to offering the platform for the mobile marketing industry to come together, join the discussion, innovate, have an attitude and push the reset button for collective future solutions. DMEXCO @home is the new way to network, to interact, to exchange. It’s real. Get your Ticket to DMEXCO @home now!

From data-driven to choice-first advertising

Raphael Rodier, Chief Revenue Officer International, Ogury

The quest for greater performance has led digital advertising players to neglect their consumers. Rather than indulging in the fantasy of AI, brands, publishers and adtech now face a crucial and human challenge: users have woken up and lost trust in the model that’s been imposed on them.

Establishing a Progammatic Media Buying Solution – Perils, Pitfalls and Partnerships

Noelia Amoedo, CEO of Mediasmart 

Many advertisers are now looking to internalise their media buying processes, and numerous companies are being set up to offer advertisers a media buying service in the programmatic space. There are two possible routes here, as in any decision that involves using technology: buy or build your DSP. But firstly, let’s define what a DSP actually is.

4 Strategies for Capitalising on the Micro-Moment Economy

Digby Lewis, Head of Platforms & Distribution at iris Worldwide

This is a story about change. Humans have a very linear perception of how things evolve: we believe things will change at broadly the same rate. The truth is, things have never changed so fast before… and will never change so slowly again. Even the concept of Moore’s law, where processing power doubles every 18 months, has been declared redundant by MIT. The truth is, technological change is exponential. Which means that we have to adapt ever faster to make our marketing communications more in step with consumer behaviour.

The Businessman, The Porter, and the world’s biggest marketing opportunity.

Kavita Kovvali, Head of Marketing at FluidAds

Earlier this month I was travelling with my husband from the UK to South Eastern India.

We were on our way to visit family and friends in Visakhapatnam, a beautiful city in the state of Andhra Pradesh also known as ‘The Jewel of the East Coast’.

However, in order to get there, we had to take a connecting flight via Chennai.

Unlike the tiny airport in Visakhapatnam, Chennai’s airports are large and overcrowded- it’s a challenging place to be when you’re used to the easy transits of Heathrow. However, on this occasion, all we had to do was walk from the International terminal to the Domestic terminal.

The importance of open sourcing software to keep apace in an ever changing digital landscape

Jason Cooper, General Manager, Mobile at Integral Ad Science

Mobile is projected to represent nearly 80% of digital ad spending by 2020 and over 40% of consumers check their phones within the first five minutes of waking up in the morning. The average 18- to 24-year-old will do so a further 81 times over the course of the day. Mobile devices have become central to our lives, affecting how we interact with the world around us.

Shell in the Digital Domain

Peter Adams, Digital Marketing Manager – Mobile at Shell

Shell has been active in the mobile domain for several years now and has learnt much about the potential of mobile and how to leverage a global platform for local marketing engagement and activities.

Shell recognises the importance of the emerging digital eco-system and is actively discovering new business models which are developing in accordance with new customer engagement opportunities. The digital world is evolving quickly and you have to be in a continuous development mode as the technology matures and customers adjust to changes in how we interact with each other.

The Race to Mobile and Digital Unison

Noelia Amoedo, CEO at mediasmart

With mobile now the core consumer focal point, advertisers are fully aware of the true value of mobile screen time. They are also cautious however, that with multi-screen and multi device considerations becoming crucial, a mobile delivery must also work alongside other digital channels to maximise advertising budgets.

From an advertising perspective, we’re still some way off seeing fully converged mobile and digital worlds however. Much of the fragmentation stems from the fact that mobile comprises an app ecosystem, whereas Web and apps differ fundamentally.

From a tracking and audience management perspective, for example, advertisers rely heavily on cookies on the Web to understand consumer behaviour and tweak their ads for optimum relevance and context. In the app world, however, this simply isn’t possible. To work in a  cookie-less environment an entirely different tracking and attribution model is needed.

The app ecosystem is also much more complex. With Web campaigns advertisers look to deliver them via one of the four major browsers so, testing and quality assurance can be easily achieved. In the app world however, ads and landing pages are largely accessed within an application, rather than a browser. Manually ensuring that the end-to-end user experience is flawless is nearly impossible, as the experience depends on the specific software used within the app –  and the market is extremely fragmented. The right software is required to automatically detect where the ad is being properly shown and to ensure quality.

There’s also other technological factors to consider, with many of the benefits and opportunities within mobile, such as geo-location, requiring specific technologies to properly support those functionalities.

This type of complexity means mobile and digital still struggle to converge. With the app ecosystem becoming more prevalent it’s impossible to simply replicate technologies from the digital world into mobile, which companies born for desktop tend to do. Technologies that work effectively in the mobile ecosystem need to consider the particular intricacies of the mobile world from their core – taking into account not only mobile web, but the in-app ecosystem – and this has given rise to the growth of mobile-first ad-tech companies.

Advertisers can no longer be effective in mobile with a simple add-on to digital, and those who ignore the application ecosystem, will miss out on a huge captive audience.

It’s clear that mobile is no longer the future. It is the present. But for a clear impact on sales it has to be integrated with the digital world. The two can’t function in isolation. Market consolidation is coming, and it will be largely driven by the needs and demands of advertisers. Yet it’s surprising to see certain industry watchers assuming that it will be the digital world that will extend into mobile. Mobile is far more complex: it must handle multiple formats, rendering technologies and tracking tools both in Web and app environments. Could we see the mobile experts acquiring the digital ones? With convergence approaching we’ll soon see who is leading the pack.