The Impact of Mobile on Marketing and Branding. Insights From the Impact Conference.

The second annual Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) Impact conference, held this past week in New York, offered marketers new perspectives on how to leverage mobile in their branding and campaigns. New technological advances such as VR, AR and AI can be creatively used to help consumers better engage and interact with products and services.

The Power of the Consumer

Mobile in particular is a very powerful tool for the consumer since they have all of the control. Kristi Argyilan, Senior Vice President Marketing, Target, stated that, “We can no longer simply buy their attention. We have to earn it every day.” To that end, she explained that, “We engineer relevance for true one-to-one.” Relevance is pivotal in a time of fragmented attention and a flood of messaging. Add to this the fear of brand safety and fraud means that ads and campaigns are under more scrutiny than ever before.

Overcoming Brand Damage

What do you do when a brand is damaged? Jonathan Beamer, CMO, Monster, admitted that his company, “Hasn't rocked it for a decade.” Monster was founded 25 years ago and offers a cautionary tale to others. “We were disruptors and then we were disrupted.” Today, there is a shorter life span for Fortune 500 companies with fewer and fewer maintaining their size and power over a decade. Beamer blamed bad management for losing sight of the original purpose and squeezing profits when they should have been re-invested in the business. “We missed how mobile and other technology could also be used to serve our mission.” Data and insights gleaned from research have helped Monster re-establish itself with a firm mobile presence that speaks to an invigorated target consumer – the job seeker rather than the recruiter. “We dig deep into consumer research’” and found that, “consumers want a champion. They want a company that will do right by society,” he concluded.

Enhancing Brand Position

Ophelia Ceradini, Vice President Digital Innovation and Technology, Estee Lauder, is charged with the task of enhancing an already strong brand through the use of new mobile technology to better match products to consumers. She focuses on, “The power of the human touch and emotions underpins the high touch approach.” Estee Lauder has advanced a myriad of AR elements to their site including ways that women and men can personalize their experiences online using facial recognition on skincare needs. The site then recommends which products each individual should use. Voice assistants are now enabled to recommend store locations as well as offer meditation so the application of products is hands free.

The Next Steps for Mobile

In this fast paced competitive environment, how can mobile continue to grow its marketing prowess? Dr Neil Morgan of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University is spearheading the MARS (Mobile Analytics Realtime Social) project that asks what marketing capabilities do we need to be good at to survive today? His project interviewed over one hundred executives at over 80 companies over a range of performance metrics and levels of digital adaptation.

He found there are four areas of concentration that impact a consumer’s expectations across categories: Individuality, Immediacy, Integration and Information. “We should be in the golden era of marketing with accuracy, accountability and agility,” he stated. “But instead we find entropy, barely concealed chaos, like a roller coaster creeping up before they drop you down.”

There is a lot of data available out there but what is the next step? Marketing is divided, tech is eating strategy, which bell and whistle should I choose, adding but not changing and the potential errors that can occur when we mix third party data into our first party data.

He advises that companies need to first choose a strategy and decide how they will compete. Develop growth stacks based on exchange, experience (eliminating pain points) and engagement (to drive enhanced functionality) and then join, build and manage communities. Finally, marketers need to integrate all learnings into the fabric of the organization, creating an environment of trust where people are willing to share.

Next Steps

As we all grapple with the continuing refraction of industry, a greater understanding of the potential of mobile will enable marketers to successfully leverage their consumer outreach. From damaged brands that can come back from the dead to successful brands who strive to maintain their brand position, the promise and perils of mobile need to be understood and fully integrated into a company’s mission. 

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

The Future Belongs to Mobile, But Ad Spend Growth is Slow

Now, with more and more data coming from digital sources, mobile is emerging as a must have for marketers. Not only is it capturing individual behaviors, it also helps marketers map the consumer journey through location data, app usage and purchasing behavior. One would think that ad spend would follow but while there has been progress, the growth has been steady but slow, according to Joel Rubinson, President and Founder, Rubinson Partners, Inc. speaking at the recent MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) Impact conference.

Currently, ad spend on mobile is 40% of budgets, up from 34% in 2014 or $31.4 billion in total U.S. ad spend, representing 34% of total U.S. ad spend.  “Data is the new oil,” noted Rubenstein, “But there is an oil embargo.”

This embargo is caused by a variety of challenges: Walled gardens of data are causing data gaps. Data is available on some platforms but not on others. User ID sharing has gotten tighter in a GDPR environment. MTA (Multi-touch Attribution) providers vary in their permission to access certain data. All of these missing variables require the need to ascribe and in doing so, “we may not get the comparisons right,” stated Rubenstein, “and the whole predictive value of the model breaks down.”
To avoid the problems in attribution of marketing effects caused by publishers not offering data access, Rubinson suggests considering four possible workarounds:

• Go all in with a publisher
• Switch ad servers that don’t restrict IPs
• Use an MTA provider with approved tagging systems
• Create an uber-model combining characteristics of Mixed Marketing Models and MTA (with possible A/B testing)

It will take a while for the ad spend to truly represent the full promise and value of mobile but, through the work of such organizations as the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and their Marketing Attribution Think Tank (MATT), the world of marketing measurement and attribution  will gain better measurements, tools and predictive connections to the consumer journey.

This article first appeared in Cynopsis

A Multi-Touch Attribution Model in a Complicated World

Finding the ultimate model for Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) is difficult if not impossible but the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) believes that, while not perfect, their newly released MTA model is a big step forward in leveraging data to ascertain attribution.  At a recent breakfast during Advertising Week, Greg Stuart, Chief Executive Officer, Mobile Marketing Association, hailed it as “the next generation measurement initiative which gives user-level data proportional credit against a granular list of touch points.”

The path to a better MTA model was not easy.  When it comes to attribution there are many unknowns in the consumer journey.  At what point was the sales decision made?  Was it a banner ad that flipped the switch in consumers’ minds?  Was it a TV spot or maybe a recommendation from a trusted friend?  In addition to these unknowns, the consumer consideration process varies by category and even, according to Stuart, by platform within companies.  Buying toothpaste has a different purchase cycle than buying a car.  Buying in a Walmart brick-and-mortar store is different from buying through Walmart.com.

”Attribution accuracy largely depends on the quantity and quality of the data,” noted Antonio Lyon, CEO U-Glove, who attended the breakfast.  Key factors in the consumer’s buying journey are excluded from the data, such as word of mouth, or brand affinity, so that it doesn’t tell the whole story.”

The MMA’s MTA model does take a deep dive into a range of datasets and is highlighted in a data map that takes into consideration four buckets regarding data: Linkability, Potential Aggregation, Uses in Profiling and Making Conversions.  Starting at the core, the MTA relies on unified user data IDs that bring together different devices and customer interactions -- then adding advertising cost data in order to calculate ROI, main data categories such as linkable marketing, aggregated datasets, conversions and audience segmentations, technology for linking all of the types of data whether cookies, IDs or GPS, data delineated by sub-types such as website visits and sales and finally, sub-types of data by platform such as desktop and mobile.

MMA’s model might be another step in the long road to multi-touch attribution.  CIMM recently commissioned a study of attribution conducted by Sequent Partners and concluded that, as an industry, we have made some progress towards the development of an attribution model across media. But we still have a lot of work to do and, at least in the near term, there are few viable systems currently available that holistically capture cross-platform consumer behaviors.

“The industry is too focused on upstream processes, mainly driven by the overwhelming growth of marketing technology, such as AI, at the expense of more traditional, proven ways to truly connect with the customer,” Lyon concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com