Data, collaboration and education is the future of mobile marketing finds The Drum breakfast panel
Key insights emerged from The Drum’s Mobile Marketing Breakfast (7 June), an industry get-together in our London office, and we’ve taken the time to outline some of them to keep you on top of the developments.
Passionate panellists, Zee Ahmad, director of programmatic at Axonix, Rafe Blanford, mobile strategist at Digitas LBi and Edward Knights, new business manager, M&C Saatchi Mobile, answered mobile marketing-based subjects as varied as personalisation, location, video, adblocking, augmented reality, voice interfaces, image recognition and who may break the advertising duopoly. Snapchat and Pokemon inevitably cropped up too.
Zee Ahmad, director of programmatic at Axonix, said: "There are many issues facing advertisers, there is a lack of education on the opportunity that presents itself on mobile, specifically in app, also issues like viewability that have come from desktop, then it is about developing standards. There is also a lack of understanding around the opportunities in data, there are very few mobile first opportunities so I think that is a key issue that prevents further spend and growth.
"The future of mobile needs more data to make more sense of supply and opportunity, collaboration, we’ll see a lot more vendors working together, we in the telecom industry are looking to do this as par our partnership with AOL and Weve and finally education, providing more confidence and clarity in how we actually present mobile opportunity to buyers will drive it forward."
The evolution of location tracking, a service that informs retailers of nearby consumers via mobile, was also underlined. Brands can derive more value from learning the journeys of consumers, even geotagging retail rivals to grade the value of mobile IDs as potential (or recurring) customers. This is how luxury and high-end firms can best monetise a tool currently best utilised by the likes of low value propositions such as fast food, claimed Knights.
“With high end products, hitting someone with your message as they are passing your store just doesn’t make sense, we’ve found that we need context and on quantitative scores, a low score could be someone who clicks and engages with your ad and a high score could go to a profile that keeps clicking through and making appointments and purchases.”
Digitas LBi's Blandford outlined the opportunities on the horizon for mobile marketing; while very much a work in progress, mobile will be soon redefined by voice interfaces such as Amazon Echo, image recognition in search and augmented reality that can open up avenues for engagement wider than ever before.
Later, the 'Duopoly' of Facebook and Google cropped up, the question was posed, who could break it? Apple and Amazon were outlined as firms with the potential to break the deadlock by Blanford also urged the audience to look east citing the size of Tencent.
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