Last week the advertising authority released statistics to show that whilst TV and internet ad spend increases are driving growth to its strongest rate in 3 years, mobile marketing was failing to meet the hype.
Darren: What would be your initial thoughts on that story?
Philip: Yeah, I struggle a bit with the mobile marketing failing, for two reasons:
a) If you look at the build up or the development of online advertising, so internet-based advertising, we're not even 20yrs into it. We've seen the huge power of its take up particularly in the last 10 years, so that means that the first 10 years was a gradual build.
So if you think about mobile internet, which is still only really about 6 or 7 years in, you could argue that we're in its first 10 years of evolution, and it's following the path of any new major media platform or device category.
b) It might be slightly mistaken to think of internet advertising and TV advertising and print advertising as being something that mobile advertising is just going to be like, because I don't think it will, it's a different thing, a different set of interactions with the consumer.
Clearly the thing that we've seen with mobile which wasn't really as much the case in the wider internet space is this huge proliferation of apps, and in the end the app is kind of an in-device marketing experience isn't it?
D: Yes, that's right.
P: And if you look at the great apps, it's obviously been massive, from no apps at all a few years ago, to huge app stores, obviously from Apple and Google with Android particularly. So I don't think one can think particularly in terms of mobile marketing on mobile looking like mobile marketing might have looked on bigger screens, PC, TV, whatever.
So that's one thing. Another thing is that mobile devices are getting more powerful, and they're getting bigger. So if you look at the phablet, and you look at the tablet, both of which are mobile devices – why is that different to internet based advertising? It isn't really is it? So is your tablet like your laptop or PC, is your tablet really much less of an advertising environment or a marketing environment? Not really. I think with HTML5 and other such developments, we're going to see more, it's going to be more of a rich internet experience. You just need to take a look at the new iPhone6+ to get that.
In fact, whether devices are going to get bigger or not is irrelevant. The point is that they're all going to get more and more powerful, but as they get more powerful then they start to share experiences and as a result the whole mobile marketing, indeed the whole mobile advertising industry, gets bigger and more powerful.
D: So who do you feel does mobile marketing well?
P: Let's take one company as an example. So you take Facebook who obviously are a leading social network and they've obviously built their advertising business to be mobile first. Their results are now largely driven by their success within the mobile advertising space so they're a great example of a not-small company, (by market cap they're now one of the biggest internet businesses in the world), betting their future on mobile marketing and advertising.
D: What do you see as the potential pitfalls of mobile marketing?
P: Most businesses are increasingly thinking in terms of multi-channel, multi device, multi browser experiences. Businesses who approach each channel as a completely isolated experience – that's a natural pitfall. As consumers, that isn't the life we lead any longer. We dip into whichever channel or device is around us as and when we need it, yet many companies think in terms of being binary when it comes to channels.
I think the other pitfall is thinking in terms of mobile advertising without being confident that your web presence is properly 'mobile first'. That may seem obvious now but there are still a lot of businesses with websites that are a bit mobile 'friendly' but they're not really mobile first. If we think in terms of now, in reality, there are more mobile devices than there are human beings on this planet – a huge milestone, with well over 6 billion mobile devices out there! It isthe largest single device category this planet has ever seen by quite a factor. Bearing this number in mind, businesses increasingly do need to think about their web presence being mobile first. It also needs to run on other devices but it should be mobile first. And that's a different way of thinking about how you design, build and manage websites.
D: What are the benefits?
P: More than 6 billion benefits – that where the mobile market is! More importantly, I think that people are going to use their mobile devices for more and more stuff. People talked many years ago about whether the mobile device would become the remote control for your life. And it's kind of starting to go that way. So if we think about the new device category which everyone's starting to get excited about which is watches – Smartwatches – well, the Smartwatch is tethered to your mobile phone. If we think about things like Smart Glasses, assuming that ever takes off, (I think it's a little way off as there are some practical issues to think about getting through), again that would most likely be tethered to your Smart phone.
So if you think about what's going on in Smart homes or Smart offices, again they're gradually starting to tether it to the Smart phone, so either your car or your Smart phone again tethered to each other defines what happens in terms of lights going on. So we're obviously seeing Smart phones increasingly becoming remote controls for traditional devices like TVs, thanks to some of the more modern internet connection deviceslike Apple TV and various other cable TV products.
So if we consumers, (because in the end we only market to consumers), are going to have phones that are increasingly intelligent, and increasingly connected to other devices then I think this 'mobile first' approach doesn't become a thing we should merely toy with/think about/consider, I don't think we have a lot of choice. And when we look at all of us, if we look at the internet's growth and look at how the internet's being consumed, it's unequivocal now, it's increasingly mobile. Doesn't matter which category – B2C, B2B, which sector, that's the way we live our lives. As devices become more and more intelligent, that's going to be more and more the case.
D: Great. And on a side note…
In view of the SpaceShip Two crash, do you think Richard Branson should continue with his space tourism project?
P: What I think he should do is obviously irrelevant but I'm sure he will! Yeah, that's a knock but I don't think any of the leaders of space projects will lose focus, whether it's SpaceEx or Branson's, you've got some pretty big guys pushing some pretty big projects – Jeff Bezos over at Amazon, Musk's ex PayPal now, Tesla or Branson and there are a few others – it's a natural frontier to want to push into.
They will keep going and they will hit bumps in the road, as there always are. Any business which is a bit pioneering hits bumps in the road. The rest of us slightly normal people think that each time a bump in the road happens that that's the end of that and, of course, it never is at all. It's just part of the process, it's evolution. If you're not pushing boundaries, you're not hitting speed bumps.
Pioneering is naturally risky – doesn't matter if you're doing s-commerce like blur or you're trying to get commercial jets into space, it's inherently risky. Also if they survive, it's because they're higher growth – and anything that's higher growth hits speed bumps. You hit turbulence, right? And they just hit their first big bit of turbulence but I don't think it's going to stop them.
Is there a parallel to what we're doing at blur? Yes. Look at the services industry. One of the last massive bastions of analogue. And it's a $2-5 trillion business, dependant on how you measure it, worldwide for B2B services – it's massive! And yet it's still based on mainly analogue behaviour.
Whoever ends up being the digital leader, blur or any other, in that transition of the services industry doing it the old way using the black book, having physical rosters, most of the work/collaborations through face-to-face meetings, and being as a result constrained by time and space and geography, now that's going to go. And someone's going to be able to be an Ali Baba or an Amazon or whatever, or a Google of the services' digitisation. And anyone that's trying to make that happen – given that services are intangible and intangible things are hard to systematise, not surprisingly – and we think we've got as good a chance as anyone, has got a very valuable, important business. blur's done really cool things – and we'll hit more speed bumps.
…CONTINUED NEXT WEEK IN PART 2!
For more information, visit blur Group website: www.blurgroup.com
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