Here we discuss the increasing power and reach of mobile networks, smart technology and wearables, and how blur, our customers and the wider world uses mobile technology.
D: Following Moore's Law, where the computer's power is increasing all the time, there will soon be a time when the Smartwatch and other devices perhaps won't need to be tethered to the phone, they'll have enough computing power themselves.
P: It shouldn't really matter as they're all mobile devices. How they connect to us as consumers should be entirely irrelevant, just seamless – it's in the background, it doesn't matter. But what do you care about as a consumer? What you care about is 'well, I want internet capabilities to just follow me around as I need them'. It should be irrelevant where I am or what device as the intelligence moves increasingly into the network. As long as the network is connected (internet protocol) then I am, as a result, connected.
My daughter recently, who's getting more and more into photography was saying to me ' If I get a new Apple , will it absolutely have iPhoto?' 'Well, of course, it shouldn't matter any more,' I said, 'why do you want to store it on the device? You'll store it on the network' and she said 'of course!'. So that's the new world – it's irrelevant what sits on the device, it's all on the network. Devices become consumables that we just use, throw away, we just don't care.
We're about to see the next wave – the Smart wallet. The internet and mobile industry have been talking about your Smartphone becoming your wallet forever. It's taken a long time because of course it's very non-trivial, but there are some big breakthroughs going on right now that mean your Smart wallet, ie your mobile phone, does become your wallet and cashless is a reality.
In fact, interestingly, even without me having to do much at all, the most recent thing I bought physically in an Apple store, they had me download their app and I just did it on my phone. Ding, ding, ding, ding, they had my ID, they pulled out the app, we just did it together and I just bought some speakers, walked out and that was it. Didn't even pull my card out. So that's changing, that's happening underneath us – so when we think of mobile marketing, we can't just think in terms of traditional – is there an interrupting ad, is there a banner, a little audio thing that comes up…
No, the mobile is a whole different kind of device. a) You talk on it so you don't necessarily want to be interrupted with someone talking back at you like a TV ad, right? and b) it's got a smaller display screen so the way in which I want to be presented with little ads is going to be different, it's more immersive, it's more experiential rather than an interruption.
D: OK, so how does blur use mobile marketing?
P: There are two or three foundational things that we've done. One of them was our whole kind of philosophy around marketing, period, which has always been that we would forget about 'digital first'. Up until now it's always been 'digital only'.
So if the way in which you want to communicate with your customers (which is what this is all about), if that lives on the premise of digital only then you're naturally already a bit deviceless. As long as you don't produce your e-shots really badly then everyone will read them wherever they are.
I think that 'digital only' has always been really important to us. We've always had a mind to mobile first. For instance, when Google came out with the mobile ads and, more importantly, the ads that carry phone numbers…everyone thinks in terms of Google doing mobile ads but actually the first step that Google made was to say 'doesn't matter where the ad goes, if we have a simple click to call then that's going to work particularly well on mobiles' but that's a generic ad with one 'click to call'.
So we quite early went into 'click to call' and it works well. So this whole thinking about marketing as digital, and as a result multi-device, then that's something that blur's always done.
blur 4.0
More recently, with blur 4.0 (which is the latest release of our platform), we've done two things that were important which we decided on middle of last year and now we've done.
One is that we've moved to a single domain (and that might seem obvious but most people don't do it). Most businesses still think of their mobile site or presence as being something that is different to their web. So you'll have one website at www.whatever.com, right, and you'll have a mobile site at m.whatever.com – and they're actually two different sites that do different things. That's how everyone starts out. Certainly, a few years ago, that was the natural way to start.
When we started testing a mobile site that's what we did three or four years ago, but then with technologies really coming through, particularly last year, and with things like HTML5 and some of the standards developing, that's actually less relevant – so now you can genuinely have a fully adaptive and fully functional website that can run off any device.
So then you have to make a decision about which device you're going to design to first – there's got to be one. Rather than compatibility, it's more thinking in terms of the experience. Do you want this experience to be derived from a kind of TV-type experience or a PC-type experience or a laptop, or a phablet or a tablet or a Smartphone – we decided that we'd leapfrog and so our latest platform was designed Smartphone first. It's a very different way of thinking about design and it took us really about 5-6 months just to get through – and with doing that, we also moved ourselves to an environment (which is quite complex to do) where we run off one URL which is www.blurgroup.com.
So it doesn't matter where you are, what browser you're using, what device you're on, as long as you remember www.blurgroup.com, just whack it in and we do the rest for you. So we do the heavy lifting, you don't have to remember anything, and as a result we can build (you have to do more of the thinking) but in the execution it's great as you have one site that runs anywhere. And we've done all those things now, it's set the foundation. In terms of mobile advertising, we're always testing – most recent test is Facebook ads. Early days yet but so far it seems to be working. Obviously with B2B, it is different.
D: How do blur's clients use mobile marketing?
P: The simple answer to that one is that it's hugely diverse. Some clients are still real novices in mobile marketing, some are really quite advanced.
There's definitely been an increase in projects or briefs for app design/app development. But equally we've seen an increasing number of briefs for mobile marketing, mobile advertising. The big theme for bigger is just multi-channel – I think that's been their big theme for this year, and will be next year and probably was the year before. Big companies think in terms of multi-channel rather than mobile first – that's a little edgy as yet.
It's more the smaller, medium sized companies, the more digitally aware, the faster moving companies that are making the leap to the tech industry – wow, it's got to be the Smartphone. In the end, that's where the bulk of your traffic is going to come from. Whether it's 6 months out or two years out, it really doesn't matter – the point is that's where it's going. I think the rest of blur's customers over the next few years, small, medium and large, that's where they're going.
D: Does location make a difference?
P: If you look at mobile take up – there are two ways to look at that – for countries with a really established phone environment (landline), some of them took longer to adapt to mobile. Some of them didn't – and some of them started out making regulatory boobs that didn't help them – the US for example. They played catch up – although historically they have tended to be somewhat of a laggard in mobile phone usage. But America early on made the mistake of giving out regional licences – so as a result if your mobile phone operator was strong on the East Coast, that didn't help you make phone calls to other places. While Europe came up with one standard GSM – they've always had a more homogenous phone market.
But the first proper Smartphone, put bluntly, was the iPhone from USA. Africa has a really bad line infrastructure so they decided years ago to throw their money at mobile development, so as a developing continent is really quite advanced in mobile.
Obviously today China is the largest country in the world in terms of mobile subscribers, but they tend to have a higher propensity for low end devices.
This will not be the case in 5 years time – today's high end will be tomorrow's low end. Every device will be the Smart Phone – high end or lower end. The term Smartphone won't be used. Probably the same with cameras – everything should, and will be, Smart. All based on the development of the microchip. And that's where Moore's Law was first applied. Every 18 months computing power will double. That is happening as microchips are getting smaller and smaller, you can literally embed them in anything.
D: Everybody essentially has what used to be considered a supercomputer in their pocket.
P: Yeah, absolutely. Soon it'll be in your ear, then invisible in your clothes, then the house, then in the network. That's all happening in different parts of the world.
D: Do you think this technological advancement is being led from the East, Japan, South Korea etc? South Korea having the most connected population smartphone wise.
P: South Korea is a new generation Japan. Japan is still very advanced, and South Korea is a great example of a leading light of cross-channel devices. Although saying that, Samsung are being challenged quite hard, so as a result I think their strategy is to lean more towards lower end devices, as it's very hard to battle against Apple in particular, who have taken the high ground in the PC space, the tablet space, and they'll do it in the smartphone space.
I think that is the challenge of East versus West. The East are very good at the massive scale, industrialized production of things that the west thinks it invented, (not always but sometimes) whereas I think the West is really good at building brand sophistication and the higher end markets. I think this is a good tension.
Eastern brands will become more global as globalization continues, although I think the West's space is trying to be the kind of more complex designer and developer of products and brands, and they can more naturally serve the middle high end markets as there are more of them in the west.
D: Does industry sector make a difference to the take up of mobile marketing?
P: Yes. It's obviously gradually narrowing, but it still does. So, what were the natural early sectors to take up mobile marketing?
Well, it was consumer, typically, and it was consumers that used your products that were naturally leant toward mobile, gaming being a good example. Consuming internet services was another example, even things like Gmail, Yahoo mail etc. Content has been a natural media space, a natural leader, even though it's been difficult for them as it tends to commoditize their offering, it's a challenge for them. Media space is another natural.
Banking was initially slow to start, but more recently is pushing really hard which is a good thing.
I think the take home for the next few years is that it won't really matter what vertical, I think everyone's got to service their customers.
D: Thanks for your time Philip
P: Thank you.
For more information, visit blur Group website: www.blurgroup.com
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