Addressing Shiny Object Syndrome: Three Considerations for Humanizing Mobile Advertising

The connected consumer has little patience for clutter or noise. The device is the compass with which we engage the world, the persistent interface that guides us through an ever-evolving digital landscape. How then, as marketers, do we evolve in order to not only keep pace with the mobile revolution, but also to utilize it as intended?

The smartphone is intensely personal, intimately integrated into our social graphs, superior in its contextual awareness of time and space, hyper-connected and nearly always within arm’s reach. The smartphone has, in essence, become a very natural extension of our human selves.

Yet, despite the newfound wealth of opportunities available to mobile marketers, we have been consistently and fundamentally flawed in both strategy and execution. The opportunity lost at the intersection of mobility and digital marketing is a failure of flawed prioritization and fascination with shiny objects. Simply put, we’ve been doing it all wrong. 

How do we address a fundamental, user-driven shift from technology-focused, reach and frequency-driven ads models to one focused on user experience-centricity? The fundamental question is, how do we make mobile advertising more human?

 Consideration One: Stop Insulting the Audience

Effective consumer engagement can no longer assume a one size fits all, spray and pray mindset. The connected consumer is constantly barraged with a dizzyingly irrelevant and intrusive array of branded digital touchpoints. 

The first step in the humanization of mobile advertising involves integrating the brand into the daily experiences of the mobile user by being additive, not intrusive. It’s not enough to simply know where your audience is and present the same brand messaging. 

For example, if a coffee brand chooses to run an ad on a weather app where high audience volume exists during peak morning hours, the call to action when selected should include GPS coordinate recognition for store location, a redeemable promotional offer, and potentially add local traffic or public transportation information based on location, or a song download for a morning pick me up.

Consideration Two: Stop Marketing At People and Start Marketing To Context

The mobility user experience is the primary consideration and that experience is, by its nature, transitional. The success or failure of any future mobility marketing effort will be defined in the execution of strategies focused on addressing user transitions – the transitions from medium to medium, dialogue to dialogue, and from context to context.

 Brands must move beyond simply marketing at people but, instead, must master marketing to a context that is determined by device or platform. They must consider the specific medium with which they choose to engage and execute experiences that accentuate its differentiated elements.

Accessibility is the foundational concern addressed by mobile sites, tablet apps and optimized campaign microsites, but the key to successful transitional marketing is anticipation. Anticipating that a consumer is on her tablet device when your commercial airs. Anticipating that the needs of consumers before 8:00 a.m. and after 5 p.m. are more time sensitive and experiential in nature.

 Accessibility requires an understanding of connectivity and content. Anticipation requires an understanding of character and context.

 Consideration Three: Provide Value in Exchange for Value

Regardless of the strategies or technologies employed, successful mobile marketing relies heavily on a fair and evenly balanced value exchange between consumer and brand. Given the intensely personal nature of smart devices, coupled with the fact that the device is nearly always within arm’s reach, it becomes extremely important that mobile marketing avoids being intrusive and irrelevant.

A mobile ad unit that directs the consumer to an optimized landing page or microsite featuring content or product exclusive to the ad engages the audience with exclusivity. Tactics such as these create a successful value exchange whereby an attention commitment is made by the consumer in exchange for priority access to the brand and the reward associated with exclusive ownership.

It is important to remember that experience is not a product of technology – it is a product of emotion. From positive emotions come connections, and from connections come relationships. And isn’t building relationships with consumers the end goal anyway?

(r)Evolution Mobility: Three Evolutionary Mobility Trends Guiding Mobile Marketing Strategies

 

5 Lessons Learned in Mobility Marketing: a 2012 Retrospective

2012 was a year of tremendous evolutionary shift in consumer behavior and brand engagement. This shift was enabled primarily by the mobile device, offering unparalleled instantaneous consumer access to brands and fueling a (r)evolution that has toppled traditional B2C marketing and ushered in a new world order C2B model of consumer brand engagement.

As we enter 2013, it is important to retrospectively digest learnings from the maturation of mobility over the course of the past twelve months. The following is intended to clearly articulate the fundamental lessons learned from current state mobility and to serve as a guidepost for the continued advancement of the medium as the primary interface for brand and consumer marketing engagement:

Lesson 1.    It’s No Longer About Mobile, It’s About Mobility

There is no first, second or third screen – there are only screens.

Regardless of their uniqueness in form factor or function, connected screens are simply humanized interfaces allowing us to communicate with and experience a digitally optimized world.

How do we address a fundamental shift from technology-focused marketing models to one of experience-centricity?

We must begin with an understanding that any technology is, at best, merely an enabler of a much greater objective – the creation of superior, additive user experiences for consumers that offer the ability to move or be moved freely and easily by removing barriers of time and space.

Lesson 2.    Mobility Blurs the Lines of Medium Demarcation

In ignoring the experience-driven revolution led by mobility, marketers and technologists alike have chosen a path of least resistance and created additional siloed channels for consumer engagement, dismissing the subtly nuanced gray matter that exists between disparate channels made up of situational determinants and connected consumer behavior.

Each device sojourns the journey between consumer and brand, but this momentary device-specific engagement does not define the experience.

Marketers in this new order of constant connectivity must devise strategies for a multi-screen consumer experience, allowing for the narrative of the brand to be transported from touchpoint to touchpoint in a transmedia engagement model where the technologies used are no longer the focal point.

Lesson 3.   The Goal is to be Additive to Personal Experience

The smartphone is intensely personal, intimately integrated into our social graphs, superior in its contextual awareness of time and space, hyper-connected and nearly always within arm’s reach. As such, the smartphone has, in essence, become a very natural extension of our human selves.

An increased focus on solving for use cases unique to mobility, providing additive functional utility that increases efficiencies, must be the primary emphasis in effective, sustainable mobility strategy.

The user experience is defined by the utility it provides. Technologies and products can be commoditized, experiences cannot.

Lesson 4.    Mobility Exists in Context

The mobile medium represents the most powerful mechanism for delivering contextually relevant consumer-brand communications yet experienced in marketing.  Marketers who effectively solve the complexities associated with the mobility will provide unique experiences for consumers, irrespective of the constraints of time or space, in ways differentiated, highly relevant, and intensely personal.

To flourish in this new environment, marketers must be constantly accessible as well as prepared to anticipate – prepared to provide the tools to allow consumers to pull information from them when required, but they must also be prepared to initiate engagement with contextual relevance and personalization.

Lesson 5.   Mobility is Transitional

The consumer experience is the primary consideration and that experience is, by its nature, transitional. The success or failure of any future marketing effort will be defined in the execution of transitions – the transitions from medium to medium, dialogue to dialogue, and from context to context.

Anticipating transitions and communicating with consideration of context is where the battle for consumer hearts and minds will be won.

It is important to remember that experience is not a product of technology – it is a product of emotion. From positive emotions come connections, and from connections come relationships. And isn’t building relationships with consumers the objective anyway?