This mobile world that we live in

Emma Longmate, Programmatic & Data Partnerships Manager at Weve

Picture the scene, it was a painfully hot Thursday, the post lunch lull. Everyone in the office was gazing out the window, complaining about the fact we were stuck inside working when we really should be outside enjoying the glorious British Summer. It seemed almost inhumane that we were not allowed to go and sit in a park and work from our phones. Surely it is possible to get what you need to get done, with just your mobile phone and no other resources at your disposal??

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, Axonix and Statiq – the next frontier of location marketing?

Tom Pearman, Managing Director at Weve

Last weeks’ announcement that Telefónica’s Axonix had purchased Statiq, the three year old mobile location targeting business, was exciting news not just for the Telefónica teams across Weve and Axonix, but also for the industry. Statiq have been creating waves since they launched, breaking the mould by detaching media from supply and giving buyers what they want – control of the data.

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.

The Perpetual Cycle of Hardware, Telcos and Mobile Advertising.

Alexander Ayres, Sales Manager at Weve

2003 was my first smartphone experience: the Nokia 6600. This was a simpler time where the world was inhabited by Symbians (while that may sound like an alien, this was the name of the first smartphone OS); you could install all types of software for productivity and pleasure, boost memory with SD cards and search the web. Screens were measured with pixels not retinas, memory in megabytes and internet was run on WAP/GSM, not 4G or LTE. Fast forward to 2007 and Apple launches the iPhone in the UK, exclusively on the O2 network, and the smartphone was reborn.

The future of gaming: mobile, augmented and built on micro-transactions?

 

Timothea Horwell, Research & Marketing Executive at Weve

A month on and as the dust settles, the novelty wanes, and it becomes less socially acceptable to chase a Pikachu down the street on your lunch break, we look at the future of gaming: mobile, augmented and built on micro-transactions.

As a game, it’s been hard to ignore. As a concept, it’s been near impossible; nothing has caused a media frenzy of this scale in quite some time, not even Brexit. Whatever your view on Pokémon Go, its impact in the last month has been undeniable. With more daily users than Twitter at one point, 100 million downloads and counting, and enough articles written about it to put Kim Kardashian to shame, Pokémon Go tapped into something in the zeitgeist to become the most popular mobile game of all time.

Mobile World Congress 2016: Key Trends

Tom Pearman, Commercial Director at Weve

Mobile World Congress 2016 was a hugely impressive event with almost 100,000 delegates (growing again) and a credible amount of exhibitors showing off some of the best tech in market. From the obvious big tech players in Google, Facebook, MSFT and an apparent return from Nokia through to the smaller more niche exhibitors showing off the more unusual tech like the connected BMW and Oral B’s smart toothbrush. In the three days I spent in Barcelona I covered over 50km walking across the halls and there are a number of themes that were worthy of sharing.

Weve Source’s five rules for brilliant mobile creative

Rowan Newman – Head of Creative at Weve.

Mobile creativity doesn’t get much positive press at the moment. Sadly it’s getting worse as poor creative has been one of the problems credited with the rise in mobile adblocking. So what can be done about it? At Weve we believe there is plenty, through harnessing the power of the mobile device, its capabilities, it’s unique qualities and its captive audience. Since I launched Weve Source, our creative division in late 2014 we have been sharing our learnings with clients to keep improving the quality of their creative executions. I wanted to share my top five rules for making brilliant mobile creative…

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.

Mobile – one size doesn’t fit all

Nigel Clarkson, Commercial Director, Weve

The trade press seems alive just now with stories of the inexorable rise of ‘mobile’. There is unmistakeable excitement around this small device which is capable of doing so many things.  The ability of mobile to drive search, social, video, SMS, display, apps, and of course the future of areas like beacons and a whole new sector of location marketing means exciting times all round.

Over the last few years, in media terms, the migration of services and time now allocated to a mobile has been an utterly seismic shift, far more pronounced than the years it took for online to grow in its early stages.  Inevitably the terms ‘online’ and ‘mobile’ will become more blurred because the simple fact is that when people are ‘online’ now, it is more likely to be on a mobile device anyway.

Just this week we have seen two stories that highlight this huge shift in consumer behaviour.  The first is news from ComScore that the majority of digital media consumption now takes place in mobile apps.  52% of ‘digital time’ is now spent in mobile apps, and when you then throw time spent on the mobile web this figure goes up to 60%.  It should come as no surprise that within this figure, most time is spent on social media, entertainment, games and news/information.  In other words people are going where content is most engaging, entertaining or useful.  Combine this with the functions available on the mobile like touch, gyroscope, sound activation and it feels like mobile should be a marketers dream, so the outlook is surely a positive one.