QUESTION: Why did you select Marketing Evolution to work with on Mobile? Are there parallels you see to digital advertising a decade ago and XMOS?
We see very clear parallels between digital advertising a decade ago and where we are with mobile today. Once again, marketers are faced with a significant opportunity to leapfrog their competition by getting their marketing mix aligned to consumer’s media habits. And once again, the market needs guidance and tangible proof that the new channel can indeed add value and improve ROI. Our purpose here at the MMA is to help marketers innovate in marketing and guide them to use mobile to drive business growth. For that reason we initiated SMoX.me (Smart Mobile Cross Marketing Effectiveness), an industry-wide initiative to address these important questions and provide the right tools to the market. This is the biggest research that we have ever conducted and the most important study for mobile, ever. Marketing Evolution was a great partner for me a decade ago when I did XMOS and I was very intrigued to see how you have evolved your thinking since then. With two successful SMoX studies already under our belt and many more coming, we are really excited about the richness of insights that we will uncover in our work together.
QUESTION: We have found that most marketers are not spending enough on mobile. For marketers who are looking to deepen their mobile investment, what advice would you give them?
Indeed, there is a clear misalignment between consumer behavior and media dollar allocation. This presents a fantastic, once in a career/life opportunity to really make a difference and turbocharge the impact of your marketing without increasing your budget. Understandably, each company has a different appetite for change and innovation, which of course will impact their future success. Having said that, I am more optimistic about how marketers engage mobile today, compared to a year ago. For instance, IBM just released a study among C-level executives and 94% of them say that mobile is a hot priority. We also did our own research with marketers and found that the vast majority of them plan to increase their investment in mobile across the board.
In the end, it becomes a case of how to set the right mobile strategy, develop a learning agenda, establish a culture of test and learn in the organization and evangelize mobile internally. Having the right data and engaging the organization with the right tools is a critical component of the above and will of course make these insights work harder and guide the team to make the right decisions for mobile.
QUESTION: What is the biggest myth about mobile advertising?
There are so many myths about mobile advertising, which is why we as MMA plan to continue investing a lot of resources to conduct the right research and help marketers make the right decisions.
One of my favorite “myths” is the one around mobile creative. I hear a lot of people saying that the screen of a phone is just too small and mobile creative doesn’t look good compared to what a bigger screen / TV can offer. They use that same logic to argue that mobile ads will probably not work and people will ignore them.
The reality is of course very different. The agencies that do winning work in mobile understand that the canvas or mobile is not just the screen, but it’s also the context (location, targeting, etc.) and all the other features of a mobile device.
In that sense, mobile ads can be far more engaging and relevant to people and drive very strong results for brands. Our SMoX studies clearly proved that point, illustrating that successful creative increased results up to 3X in some cases.
Of course, you can’t really get those results if mobile creative is an afterthought. So the real problem is that brands don’t spend enough time on that currently.
QUESTION: What are the insights you feel research needs to uncover to help marketers get the best ROI possible from Mobile?
As with every new channel there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered and we at the MMA are working with marketers to define a learning agenda for the next 5 years. As a starting point we expect SMoX to help us answer some of these questions.
For instance, how much should a brand invest in mobile, which mobile channels to use and how, what is the role of location targeting, how does mobile work with other channels, etc.
Then there is a whole other chapter that has to do with mobile creative: developing best practices by mobile channel, benchmarks for engagement and effectiveness, etc.
Attribution is of course another big buzzword lately, rightfully so, and a lot of marketers are trying to figure it out. And then, there are a lot of more specialized issues like the impact of programmatic buying, etc. Suffice to say that we will be very busy trying to help marketers with all these.
QUESTION: How should marketers think about mobile (advertising? app? Geo-fencing coupon machine? Other?) to get themselves out front for the next five years?
Hard to give a catch-all answer here because each category is different and every brand has its own goals and needs. So as with every other channel, there is no magic bullet in mobile either.
As a starting point, I would repeat what I said earlier, that brands have an amazing opportunity today to make their budgets work harder by reallocating dollars to mobile and optimizing their budgets. There are unique opportunities for targeting and of course one has to think holistically in terms of using mobile in an integrated way with all the other things that they do across the path to purchase.
In the end, having a mobile strategy and a roadmap with well-defined milestones, will allow brands to make the right decisions and think more strategically about mobile, find ways to integrate it with the other things that they do and leverage its unique capabilities to connect with consumers.
