Gardens, GDPR, and Great Spanish Weather(?) – Our week at MWC ‘18

Adam Rubach, MD UK at Ogury 

Last week was the hotly-anticipated Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, the annual event bringing pioneers and inquisitive minds together to discuss all things mobile.

Unfortunately, this year the seasonal Spanish sun wasn’t on our side. However, we made the most of our Ogury Networking Garden which, despite the rain and even occasional snow, was a great success. The unpredictable weather made for an unforgettable product launch of our latest mobile data solution, Active Insights. People were huddled under branded umbrellas in the middle of a sprinkling of snow, but we were delighted to see that there was still a substantial and buoyant crowd to watch our founders kick off the next chapter in our company history.

Understanding mobile’s role in the automotive purchase journey: a ‘drive through’ Weve’s Automotive Research 2017.

Timothea Horwell, Marketing & Research Manager At WEVE

Weve’s Marketing & Research Manager, Timothea Horwell, explores the paradox of the modern day automotive purchase: a wealth of mobile data to understand how to reach prospective customers at moments that most influence their decisions, but a decreasing time-frame in which to do so. Weve’s research provides context to understand different drivers at each stage of the automotive journey.

Buying a car used to mean spending hours perusing the local dealership. In 2017, however, consumers are increasingly looking online for much of the purchase process, and mostly via a mobile device: Weve’s Automotive Research 2017 found 84% of consumers use their mobile at some stage when buying a car. 

Weve Source: The Art and Science of Mobile Engagement

Harry Clarke, Creativity & Innovations Manager at Weve

There is always something to compare in advertising. Content vs context, data vs creativity, technology vs humanity. All the conversations start off with one question: who will win? Yet in every seminar and workshop I’ve attended and every article I’ve read, we all reach the same conclusion: there are no winners.

The truth is, they are all cornerstones of the advertising world we work (and live) in, working together to enhance and evolve our output.

At Facebook we get things wrong – but we take our safety role seriously

Monika Bickert, Head of Public Policy Management at Facebook

Last month, people shared several horrific videos on Facebook of Syrian children in the aftermath of a chemical weapons attack. The videos, which also appeared elsewhere on the internet, showed the children shaking, struggling to breathe and eventually dying.

 

The images were deeply shocking – so much so that we placed a warning screen in front of them and made sure they were only visible to adults. But the images also prompted international outrage and renewed attention on the plight of Syrians.

How Mobile App Success Rests on Where Your Users Spend Their Time

Paul Barnes, Territory Director Northern Europe and Middle East at App Annie

Apps have become one of the most influential devices in driving consumer behaviour, with over 900 billion hours spent in apps worldwide in 2016 and over 30 apps on average used per month. People now manage a myriad of different aspects of their lives with apps – a ubiquitous component to everyday life.

The reality is that, on a daily basis, the average consumer uses approximately 10 apps. By understanding how these apps are used, where consumers are spending their time and in which apps, mobile marketers gain a unique insights into behavioural trends of a highly influential audience.

Mobile Commerce Engagement Grows As User Acquisition Costs Drop

Dennis Mink, VP of Marketing, Liftoff

Earlier this week Liftoff released our annual Mobile Shopping Apps report, highlighting the latest trends in mobile user acquisition and app engagement. The good news for ecommerce marketers is that as mobile purchases are on the rise, the cost to acquire new mobile shoppers has declined over the past 12 months.

As we inch ever closer to the holiday shopping season, marketers should take note of several important mobile shopping trends. August and early September is an opportune time to focus on new user acquisition. With mobile ad inventory costs at near lows for the year, marketers can acquire new users cost effectively, just ahead of the holidays. This is also an excellent time to test and optimize ad creative, before inventory costs shoot up. If you wait until October, you’ve already missed the window of opportunity as more competition ramps up spending, driving up costs for everyone.

Bots Are Still A Work In Progress: 5 Lessons So Far

David Skerrett, Managing Partner at Nimbletank

The Bot landscape is being shaped by the four horseman of the tech world: Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Whilst the term bot has been around for decades it is only really in the last 2 years that the volume has been turned up with many predicting that bots will be the next app, and that app’s are dead. That is an oversimplification, of course, but given so many young people spend their time on their mobile messaging apps, and given the success of the WeChat “app of everything” in China it is natural agencies, brands and tech players in the mobile space pay close attention to the Bot trends already clearly evidenced.

Mobile marketing: Engaging Gen X,Y & Z

Written by Jane Ostler, Managing Director, Media & Digital, Kantar Millward Brown

Kantar Millward Brown’s AdReaction: engaging Gen X, Y and Z study reveals vital insights into how marketers should use mobile, explains Jane Ostler, Managing Director of their Media & Digital practice.

Marketing communications are undergoing a seismic shift. Brand messages are slowly but surely moving away from the ad break and deeper into consumers’ lives, with much of this driven by the combined influences of younger audiences and mobile device usage.

AdReaction reveals that 74% of Gen Z (16-19 year olds) globally spends more than an hour a day on mobile devices, more than any other generation.

In this world of declining ad receptivity, brands must find new ways to reach consumers beyond the confines of traditional advertising, and need to use mobile in more creative ways than ever before. 

AI, VR and AR. The trilogy at MWC

Stephen Upstone, CEO & Founder of LoopMe Media

Another Mobile World Congress has come and gone, with over 2000 exhibitors and over 108,000 attendees. This year I found that attention had moved away from the topic of connected devices and to the trilogy of AI, VR and AR.

While virtual reality headsets completely take over your vision to give you the impression that you’re somewhere else, augmented reality adds to your current vision, projecting info on top of what the consumer is already seeing.

Wired2016: The Democratisation of Information

Timothea Horwell, Jr. Marketing and Research Manager at Weve

It’s estimated that 40% of the world is connected in one way or another, with this expected to rise to 100% over the next 20 years. Ultimately, this will democratise internet access, but result in 8 or 9 billion people requiring network capabilities. With the burgeoning digital revolution 2.0 and the exponential need to connect ‘things’ as well as people, a reliable and dependable infrastructure will be critical. It seems fitting then that the Wired2016 conference was sponsored by Telefonica, one of the world’s largest telecommunications providers, as the emergence of IoT and M2M blur the lines between sectors, and telcos become increasingly tasked with connecting millions of devices, machines and users.