Recently I was asked to write an opinion piece for the magazine Marketing, capturing my thoughts on the future of mobile marketing which has always been touted as a large and emerging opportunity, but has yet failed to gain critical mass and more importantly material advertiser support.  Below is an extract of the article.

THE FUTURE OF MOBILE ISN’T MOBILE

Mobile Marketing has been the long-held, future of advertising. A promise that everyone has got excited about, but few delivered on. I’ve seen numerous reports from industry experts and market analysts, who’ve produced endless business cases and revenue models that never seem to gain any traction anywhere but in a spreadsheet.

Many mobile-based businesses start and fail even before they’ve worked out who they are, where they fit and more importantly what the consumer need and engagement point is. The promise of mobile has been built on a nascent industry that hasn’t really found its feet so far. It begs the question, why have so many people been so wrong for so long? In my humble opinion we’ve all been considering the problem, or opportunity in the wrong context.

The future of mobile isn’t “mobile”. Building yet another disconnected platform, which operates singularly, is the problem. The real question isn’t about what is mobile, it is more about what connectivity and ubiquitous consumer centric computing experiences hold.

The Black Swan of the mobile industry came from an outlier that radically changed the face of what we understood the market to be, Apple. Like it or not Steve Jobs and the Apple crew decided to rewrite the rulebook, grounded in a consumer truth & desire for simplicity when they launched the iPhone.

iPhone

The iPhone was one simple device that allowed consumers to do almost everything they could on a desktop or laptop, with the benefits of a compact device that had GPS functionality that could fit perfectly into your pocket at the cost of a normal mobile contract. The iPhone ran basically the same operating system as a Mac, it synced seamlessly with all your business and personal applications wirelessly and it was just easy. Combine this with creating a relatively open software platform that developers could deploy a range of consumer centric applications on, with an open software market place where developers could reach a global audience and monetize their ideas rapidly. Hey presto the face and future of mobile changed irreversibly.

The biggest change Apple brought to the mobile industry was they established and built sustainable consumer behaviour, where for the first time consumers could use mobile devices in an entertaining and meaningful way.  Almost everyone I know now uses the SAME applications and services on their desktop as they do on their mobile. Tweeting, Facebooking, Googleing, blogging, emailing, taking and sharing photos, reading PDF’s, listening to and downloading music have all become a ubiquitous experience, regardless of the device or location. The iPhone really enabled the “Social Web”, combine this with location-based mobile applications, and the face of the mobile game has changed forever, why? Because Apple rewrote the rulebook.

Apple changed the clunky face of mobile marketing and e-commerce. They did what Microsoft, Symbian, Blackberry, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, HTC et al couldn’t do. All of the previous industry incumbents were all operating based on a set of rules designed by engineers and analysts that had a vested interest in developing a disparate market, not a connected market. Apple innovated that last 10% of the mobile market and that innovation has had a 200% impact on the mobile industry as we know it.

Before you start to think this is a plug for Apple, have a look at the ripple effect across the entire mobile industry. Nokia has launched “me too” devices with their own music store, HTC have launched devices with similar interfaces and capabilities, Blackberry has started to support their developer community with a “me too” application store. The rate of change in mobile is increasing exponentially, all because an outlier rewrote the rules.

Apple's App Store

So where is the advertising world in all of this though? The advertising community both creative and media is still way behind. Ad Networks are still trying to sell on a silly impression based model (CPM) through serving non-targeted, dumb ad’s that have little relevance to a consumers experience that are at best annoying. Creative agencies and their digital heads have not yet woken up to the fact that it would be a better use of clients funds to build a simple mobile site, designed for a handheld device that delivers consumer utility rather than fight for a full flash and video site that can’t be viewed on a mobile device or indexed in a search engine. It is time to catch up people, understand the consumer and find the right intersection point.

The future isn’t mobile; it is ubiquity of experience across any device that delivers consumer utility and meaningful brand engagement.

As some of you know I’m currently in the USA. Since I’ve been here I’ve attended AdTech NY ‘09 and am now in San Francisco visiting Efficient Frontier, our tech partner.

Trip has been great so far & plan to post a few new articles coming out of AdTech covering:

- WPP’s view on the state of the industry, trends and emerging markets.
- The rise of the Second Channel digital ad market as the growth driver of the market.
- The state of the digital economy from a US perspective, with views from UBS & Pubmatic.com
- The outlook for Search Marketing, Local Search, Video Search etc.

Look out for new posts over the next few days.

I’m fortunate enough to be off to NYC next week to attend AdTech NYC 2009.  I attended AdTech SFO earlier in the year and found it hugely beneficial, mainly in terms of getting a wider perspective on digital trends from the USA from both leading advertisers and major agencies.

Sessions I’m attending include:

Day 1

• Opening Keynote with Sir Martin Sorrell (WPP) 2010: What’s coming down the line
• Defining the New Media Currency—How to Bring Traditional Media Metrics Online, Or Should We?
• The Modern Agency
• Advertising Operations in the Digital Age: How to Build, Scale and Leverage a Next Generation AdOps System
• The New Consumer Funnel: Engagement Mapping and the Death of the Last Click Reporting Standard
• Marketing 3.0—Building Great Brands in the Digital Age
• TV 3.0: Reach + Targetability—The Promise of Addressable Advertising

Day 2

• Keynote: Jonathan Miller, Chief Digital Officer, Chairman and CEO, Digital Media Group, News Corporation
• The Rise of the Audience Marketplace
• Digital Branding: Measuring the Effectiveness of Online Brand Advertising
• The Twitter Effect: Leveraging Twitter to Drive Brand Engagement and Bottom-Line Results
• Creative Showcase I: Going Beyond Digital—Contagious Ideas That Change the Conversation
• Creative Showcase II: Cool Stuff—That Works!

I hope to post interesting updates and views from each day, stay tuned if you are interested or as always drop me an email & I’ll send an update or session pack if I get one.

There is a battle royal on between the post click & post impression camps in digital advertising & media. Clients are increasingly becoming aware to the metrics that make a difference to their marketing efforts and in a time when all marketers are demanding more from their investments, it looks like the post click camp is clearly winning.

If you’ve read my blog in the past, you will know what I think of post view conversion metrics. Generally I think they are BS and trying to find any link to a conversion from post view cookies that have been sprayed indiscriminately is clearly based on trying to prove value where value does not exist. Anyway…..if you’d like to review that post you can check it out here.

Today I came to work & logged on as I usually do, part of my morning ritual is to read the news online before they day starts and demands kick in. Today I experienced a new form of ad format developed by Fairfax & the smh.com.au. The format is a home page, page surround where the advertiser owns all space that surrounds the news content. Let me say I think it’s an ok idea for digital branding purposes, especially on a high traffic home page like the SMH.com.au. My problem though is if you unintentionally click anywhere outside the main content area, you end up on the advertisers destination site / page, like I did.

Post click cookie spraying maybe?

What SMH.com.au have been able to engineer is the spraying of post click cookies ( yes hard to think really), where the site will record an inordinate amount of post click cookies and hence conversions within a reasonable cookie window. Again it raises the debate of data rules, last click attribution, consumer journey’s, cookie deduping etc. Personally I believe that post click is the ONLY way to determine online value creation, in combination with well-defined data business rules.

I see this as a way that the publisher community MAY, be fighting the post click / post view battle in a way that is attempting to build value back into online display advertising and stem the tide from display into Search. Is it right or wrong? You be the judge. My view….the only clickable area should be the ad itself.

Comments & alternate views welcome….

I’m just back from a week’s leave, mostly spent enjoying my home and surrounding environs, but that’s another story.

As part of catching up on general industry news first day back, I stumbled across Craig Davis’s (Chief Creative Officer and Co-Chairman of Publicis Mojo Australasia) keynote address at the 2009 Caxton Awards in Noosa. For an industry that is fighting to stay relevant in the ever changing communication, marketing and economic landscape I think his take on our collective role, is incredibly insightful and relevant.

His keynote address is attached for any of you that have a good 20 minuets or so to get enlightened. Congrats Craig on a great keynote address…..

Download keynote here

Sorry for the delay & silence between posts, I’ve only just returned from a few weeks holiday in Italy & Scandinavia.

During one of my flights I randomly pick up a copy of the London Times and found a story that caught my interest. It was about loyalty in the times of the GFC and changes in consumer behaviour. The story details a USA based brand study, sponsored by the USA CMO Council from 2007 to 2009 that focused on consumer loyalty and retention across 685 brands. The study used  data from 32 million consumer loyalty cards, similar to a Woolworth’s Every Day Rewards program.

The study found that in 2008, during the height of the GFC the average brand lost a third of its highly valuable customers – a staggering and frightening reality for direct marketers. This defection came from a group that habitually bought a specific brand for more than 70% of their purchases in a category. Brand measures of affinity, esteem and loyalty collapsed under price and promotion pressures. The study also found that in times of economic pressure, customers once loyal to premium brands in a category could be easily shifted to private-label house brands. The shift downwards was found to rapid, however the upwards shift to return to premium brands took far far longer. Over the two years of the study & data analysis, on an aggregate basis 52% of customers deemed as highly loyal either reduced their loyalty or completely defected from the brand.

The findings raise big questions for marketers and agencies (both creative & media). These include:

• Is the current strategy of hope, that deploys a spray & pray approach of TV, print, outdoor etc still relevant?
• How do we target more effectively through digital media? What is the impact of Search, Social Media, Blogging etc on purchase behaviour and intent at a retail level?
• What is the role and effectiveness of current loyalty programs? It would seem that they don’t influence behaviour as much as we all would hope. Do they need to be better planned and executed using dynamic behavioural data in an almost real-time way?

Loyalty as we all know is a key driver of revenue for brands and most marketing activity and investment are focused primarily on customer acquisition metrics with some form of loose LTV ascribed to a business case that justifies the campaign activity. As the above study indicates, in the majority of cases loyalty and retention programs lack structure, data insights, don’t track consumer behaviour and engagement and from the customer perspective lack relevance. Most programs at best follow a strategy of HOPE, where a single digit response rate is deemed successful and everyone involved slaps each other on the back and we as an industry celebrate flawed success.

Mark Buckman, the CMO of the Commonwealth Bank in Australia loudly shared his views on the role of direct communications and customer relevance at the 2009 ADMA Forum and in the Sydney Morning Herald. Simply put he believes its time for marketers to lift their game, become smarter and more insightful about engaging in a relevant way with consumers. I couldn’t agree more, most marketing is executed here in a lazy laissez-faire way with a “good enough is good enough” attitude.

Here at Downstream, we’ve also seen the rapid change in consumer behaviour. Search query volume is up significantly across almost every category and especially across banking, finance and travel, consumers are increasingly benchmarking brands against each other. The biggest rate of change we’ve also observed is in retail where Search has been traditionally shunned by bricks and mortar businesses in favour of mass media. This disconnect in the marketing equation unfortunately is consumers are increasingly turning to Search price check and either buy online or being driven to a retail outlet. Unfortunately brands that aren’t found aren’t relevant and are losing share of mind and wallet to their more dynamic, insightful and nimble competitors.

I’d love to know what has happened here in Australia over the past 2 years, how have customers defected from brands they once loved regardless of the price differential. Have the DM & eDM programs held off customer defection, how are the biggest brands in Australia thinking about the more effective use of data, segmentation, evaluation and brand engagement? What is the future of loyalty and how will it be executed more effectively than it is today?

Thoughts and opions are warmly welcome.

While not strictly advertising or economics I’ve been inspired to write a quick short post.

It is a lazy Sunday morning in Noosa (taking a short break from Sydney) & I’m currently reading a great book by Michael J Fox titled “Always looking up”. It details his personal journey from world famous actor to Parkinson’s Disease sufferer & inspirational foundation patron. Great stories about challenging conventions, common place thinking and inspirational stories from Muhammad Ali, Lance Armstrong et al who faced massive challenges to achieve something in the face of adversity. I’m a huge fan of Lance Armstrong, not for just his super-human cycling achievements but what he has done with his fame and recognition for the good of all people.

I will write a more detailed post on this soon. A great read if you are looking for positive thinking, inspiration and considering creating something new in both your personal and professional life.

New inspirational book by Michael J Fox

A Inspirational Human

“>Digital Trends from the USA.

I’m lucky enough to currently be in San Francisco, eagerly awaiting the kick-off of SFO AdTech for 2009.

Moscone Center - Ad Tech San Francisco

The thing I’m most excited about is seeing & hearing new ideas on digital performance marketing and general new on-line trends from North America, the biggest and most progressive digital country. Hopefully I’ll come back with a head full of new ideas & perspectives, ready to challenge the status quo even more, and yes beyond just Search Marketing.

I’m most interested in seeing:

• Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu – Advertising’s User Revolution in the Digital Age
• Media Boot Camp Power Session: The Modern Agency
• Media Boot Camp Power Session: Marketing Effectiveness—Improving Accountability and Returns to Impact Business Performance
• Media Boot Camp: Know Thy Customer: Hard Data + Fresh Insights
• Fear, Love and Advertising with Steve Hayden from Ogilvy Worldwide
• TV 3.0: Reach + Targetability–The Promise of Addressable Advertising
• Content Marketing Strategies: How to Leverage Social Media to Exponentially Grow Your Audience and Bottom Line
• Media Boot Camp: Search + Display–Moving Beyond the Brand vs. Direct Response Model

If anyone is interested, let me know. I’ll be posting updates over the next few days and if you are interested will make notes, content available.

Cheers

JH