How to conquer four key issues media agencies still face with mobile

What he’s recognising is that media agencies can’t simply hire a mobile expert and pretend they’ve solved mobile. You need people who understand the entire mobile ecosystem – mobile media, mobile strategy and mobile technology (automation, analytics, CRM, location/mapping and ad serving).

You need to be able to tell a client why they should use a purpose-built mobile adserver rather than the one built for desktop. And explain why the technology running your “desktop” advertising isn’t fit for purpose in a mobile world.

Media agency networks are making sizeable investment in mobile – Omnicom acquired Mobile 5, Denstu Aegis bought Fetch while WPP is amassing an armoury of mobile businesses.

The real challenge is how to integrate these businesses into existing teams and empower them to work beyond the mobile media silo, so that brands are delivered strategies that clearly show how mobile reacts and powers all media channels.

Once they’ve got this in place, they need to start solving the key challenges that are stopping brands investing in mobile.

The first issue is transparency. Clients need to have comfort that the campaign they have signed off is what is actually being delivered. They often ask for a whitelist of pre-approved sites because they want to know their brand is in safe hands. All too often, however, mobile adverts end up where they shouldn’t, events that discourage future investment in mobile.

It’s not always the fault of the agency when the campaign the agency thought it had booked is not delivered. I remember when a 'geo fence' was promised around a shopping centre, but because the partners couldn’t get enough impressions in that area, they widened the geo fence to cover an entire city.

What agencies should be doing in such situations is providing enough expert due diligence to partner with the right mobile providers – and implicit in that due diligence is the knowledge and expertise to know what can realistically be delivered on mobile.

The second issue is technology. Agencies need to meet and evaluate hundreds of vendors and all of them will be asking if they can add their SDK – quite simply a piece of code – to advertiser’s apps to source data. The truth is that most businesses (and certainly their IT and procurement teams) won’t be happy with this.

Agencies should be working with client technical teams to reduce the number of SDKs required to power a client application, rather than requiring 10 different ones for individual point solutions, be it an SDK for location, one for push or one for analytics. Part of the role of the agency is to reduce the technological barriers to participation in mobile and, while the number of vendors makes this difficult, they need to push back more against unreasonable demands.

Having the capacity to simplify the technology will also make it easier for agencies and their clients to gain a single customer view on mobile.

The limitation of the cookie on mobile is well documented, sparking a fierce scramble to offer agencies cross-device targeting and attribution, often using statistical methods to identify the same user across multiple devices.

The birth of Facebook’s Atlas will help but agencies need to go beyond knowing instinctively that mobile/tablet plays a key role in the consumer journey to being able to prove how and when mobile loops in and out of the circle. The default 'last click wins' of desktop has continued to rule.

The third issue is language: Too frequently, the role of the mobile expert at a media agency is to act as a translator. Most suppliers don’t talk English and that makes it superhard to integrate mobile into everything the agency does. Ask the average buyer if they’ve set up the PAI to enable a Programmatic Direct Private Marketplace buy and they’ll probably start pulling their hair out.

Agencies need to be tougher with tech companies that don’t learn to talk the language of advertising. Mobile experts may be able to understand such talk but vendors should be firmly told that if they want to go beyond technology trials they will need to speak media as well as tech.

The final area where agencies have work to do is revenue. Both agencies and suppliers have not done a good enough job convincing CMOs that mobile can drive revenue. That means both the short-term revenue needed to drive sales and keep the shareholders happy as well as the recurring/long-term revenue that comes from using an array of mobile tactics to drive customer loyalty and retention.

Too many mobile campaigns still simply set 'reaching' consumers via a banner or a mobile video as their goal. Agencies need to work harder to 'close the loop' from CRM to purchase and create a new set of mobile metrics. A great piece of content or relevant offer delivered to the consumer is certainly a good place to start, but let’s be clear that this is not customer acquisition on mobile.

There’s still a lot of work to do but the growing investment agencies are making in their mobile teams is exciting. What’s most encouraging is that agencies now realise the conversation goes well beyond mobile media. Mobile technology is solving business and marketing problems on a daily basis.

The time is right to start delivering on the over-used marketing phrase of 'context and location'. Get this right and mobile will finally start moving from being a cost centre to a revenue centre.

Jon Hook is VP, Advertising Evangelist at Phunware