Mobile Marketing Issue 17 - June 2014

e v i t s a re ce s n C ie ight h d g s u Au a & In o r t th deo Da k a i e V r B ile b n ia o e d e M Me r c ic h s t c i a R s s m o r C ram ing g et o r P -targ o Ge

Millennial Media is the leading independent mobile ad platform company, supporting the world’s top brands and mobile content providers. Award-winning creative, paired with our unique data and technology asset, enables our clients to connect with their target audiences as they move across screens, media and moments. We deliver, and we do it at scale.

Learn more at millennialmedia.com Š2014 Millennial Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

JUNE 2014

CONTENTS

CONTENTS COVER STORY

22 In praise of programmatic We talk to byyd CEO Victor Malachard about the company’s data-driven approach to mobile advertising

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

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Viewpoint How IBM goes about creating a compelling mobile user experience

21 Russell Buckley on…

Six golden rules to follow if you want to have a chance of winning industry awards

50 Off-deck Helen Keegan muses on SMS, mobile advertising and app discoverability

REAL WORLD

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News review We round up the biggest news stories since our last print edition appeared

10 On the ball We look at how mobile figures in the official World Cup partners’ marketing plans around the event

24 Whose data is it anyway?

Kirsty Styles considers data scandals and their implications for brands on mobile

INNOVATION

14 Wear next?

Alex Spencer lifts the lid on wearable tech, looking at the key players aiming to grab a slice of this lucrative market

30 Lights, camera, mobile Alex Spencer looks at how the movie industry uses mobile to engage with its audience

BUSINESS MODELS

44 The click trick How IQzone’s ‘Postitial’ ad unit increases click volumes, while also improving the user experience

46 Fixing mobile advertising Tamome CEO Christian Louca on what’s wrong with mobile advertising, and how we can fix it

49 Connecting the dots Fuerte’s Sharon Hartigan on ideation and digital disruption

MAKING SENSE

36 Made for mobile Amobee CTO Gil Scheinfeld 3D considers the rapid adoption of programmatic buying on mobile

39 The practical programmatic Nexage CMO Victor Milligan looks at what programmatic is and what it does

40 Retail revolution MobPartner CEO Djamel Agaoua looks at retailers’ attempts to gather the same sort of insight on their shoppers in store as they do online

43 Shining light TagPoints co-founder Jess Stephens takes a closer look at beacon technology

Editorial director: David Murphy – david.murphy@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0) 7976 927 062 Commercial director: John Owen – john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0) 7769 674 824 Business development manager: Richard Partridge – richard.partridge@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Event sales director: Shelley Dowsett – shelley.dowsett@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Business development manager: Nicola Velasco – nicola.velasco@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Sales executive: Lisa Slavin – lisa.slavin@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Production editor: Nicola Morrison – nicola.morrison@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Designer: Drew Geary – drew.geary@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Online editor: Alex Spencer – alex.spencer@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Senior reporter: Kirsty Styles – kirtsty.styles@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Reporter: Tim Maytom – tim.maytom@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Event content manager: Hannah Wallace – hannah.wallace@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Contributors: Russell Buckley, Helen Keegan Print: Advent Print Group info@advent-colour.co.uk For a paid subscription please email: subscriptions@mobilemarketingmagazine.com One Year Subscription Rates – UK: £30.00; ROW: £40.00 Mobile Marketing is published by Dot Media Ltd., 114-116 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3AH www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

JUNE 2014

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

VIEWPOINT Rodric Yates, UK and Ireland Mobile Leader at IBM, explains the company’s approach to creating a compelling mobile user experience User experience is what a person feels about the relevance and effectiveness of the digital solutions they interact with.

From a customer’s initial awareness of the solution to its end, user experience is about the meaningful aspects of how people see, hear, and touch it.

This means the focus is on how the customer enjoys and perceives value when interacting with a system. It’s about making solutions easy to use, valuable and effective for people. Organisations need to design their solutions as holistic, end-user experiences of their brands, taking into consideration the application of marketing, branding, usability and aesthetics.

blend of renowned usability heuristics, IBM mobile user experience design methods, and the concepts of emotional design. Embedded in each of the themes are the tenets of the users’ emotional journey: s 4HE lRST IMPRESSION n THE INSTINCTIVE reaction to the design; its aesthetics, touch and general feel. s 4HE USAGE OF THE FUNCTIONAL SOLUTION the ease of understanding, conducting and completing the application corresponding to its intended purpose. s 4HE ENDURING IMPACT THE USERS continuing feelings and perceptions of the solution.

IBM Interactive Experience Personal touch point The mobile channel is the most personal touch point of your brand, so understanding how to differentiate your offering involves ďŹ rst understanding what your audience wants.

This in turn involves appreciating human behaviour. You need to ďŹ nd the right balance of functionality and simplicity to help build a seamless and optimized experience.

User expectations are high, yet the most successful mobile apps happen to be the ones that do only a few things, but do them extremely well. Relevance, context and innovation are key, and a good design approach is as fundamental to a great user experience as it ever was. Organisations with a true multichannel approach and business alignment create a more rewarding and engaging brand relationship.

IBM Interactive Experience, supported

by IBM’s wider MobileFirst capability, has identiďŹ ed eight key user experience themes for guidance when designing and developing mobile-channel user interfaces. These are deďŹ ned by, and representative of, a careful

These themes are an IBM Interactive Experience point of view used to explore and address, in detail, both the emotional and technical dimensions related to modern, smart and successful mobile customer experiences. They also comprise the framework for the IBM Interactive Experience mobile-assessment method: s !LWAYS BE RELEVANT n ARE YOU GOING to offer your target users something they actually want? s +EEP IT SIMPLE n THE GOAL SHOULD BE TO minimise any virtual friction points and empower users to perform tasks they want quickly and easily. s "UILD RICHER EXPERIENCES n BY DOING so you are helping yourself become a key differentiator in a very crowded and competitive market. s 4HINK INNOVATION n BREAK NEW GROUND by introducing functionality and features that take advantage of the opportunities that mobile brings. s /PTIMISE CONTENT FOR MOBILE n ONE MUST consider constraints such as screen size, input

method, bandwidth, connection speed and even power consumption. s %ND TO END EXPERIENCE n A SOLUTION MUST be designed to ďŹ t in with your overall digital strategy, providing a continuous and seamless user experience. s "E MORE SOCIAL n MOBILE USAGE IS NOW fuelling the popularity of social networks, so organisations and brands need to understand how to ďŹ t into this socially connected world and create opportunities that can drive revenue. s 3MART EVOLUTION n HAVING THE ABILITY to respond to change and make improvements to your mobile proposition should aid advances in technology, new industry trends or differing business requirements occur.

The eight mobile user experience themes described here must be applied in concert to truly deliver on a compelling user experience for the mobile channel. IBM Interactive Experience has speciďŹ cally tailored its user-centric design approach to ensure that these themes are all front and centre in our thinking as we design and deliver mobile solutions for users.

Our approach always starts with the needs of the user and works from there, but there are a number of other fundamental questions that impact an organisation when designing for mobile e.g. device choices, development platforms, the native app versus web debate. Our full-mobile visioning and strategy approach brings the needs of the user, business and technology together to ensure the development of a strategy and solution that delivers for all. MM

For more information about IBM MobileFirst see www.ibm.com/mobileďŹ rst

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JUNE 2014

NEWS

REVIEW Alex Spencer casts an eye over some of the biggest mobile marketing stories since our last issue PubMatic Acquires Mocean Mobile

PubMatic co-founder and CEO, Rajeev Goel

On 19 May, programmatic advertising platform PubMatic acquired mobile ad firm Mocean Mobile for an undisclosed sum – though sources close to the deal suggest it was worth $15.5m (£9.2m).

Mocean has a complicated history. It was originally launched as part of mobile ad network Mojiva in 2009, but in January of this year Mojiva rebranded to take on the Mocean name, and was subsequently transitioned to an entirely programmatic network.

PubMatic plans to integrate Mocean’s ad serving technology into its existing mobile offering, which will enable it to provide publishers with an end-to-end mobile solution for traditional direct sales,

EU Court Rules Against Google in Data Privacy Case On 13 May, the European Union Court of Justice ruled against Google in a landmark case, issuing a directive that puts responsibility for personal data firmly in the hands of search engine operators.

The Court ruled that search engine operators are the ‘controller’ of data they collect and store, even if it is listed on thirdparty sites, and the subjects of data may request to have links to pages containing their data removed from a search engine.

Any company which operates in Europe is answerable, even if its physical servers, which process the data, are located elsewhere.

This essentially grant European citizens the

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much-discussed ‘right to be forgotten’ – for more on that, check out our privacy feature on page 24.

The ruling came in the wake of two major security controversies: in April, there was the discovery of the ‘Heartbleed’ security bug, a vulnerability in the widely-used OpenSSL cryptography, which meant that information thought to be safely encrypted could be accessed and stolen. Back in January, the ‘leaky apps’ scandal made headlines, after it was discovered that popular apps like Angry Birds and Google Maps had been targeted by NSA and GCHQ to access private user data.

For more, go to bit.ly/MMMPrivacy

programmatic direct sales, and mediation.

PubMatic will continue to support Mocean’s existing services and promises to increase investment in product development across the company’s mobile platform.

The acquisition is part of a larger trend of consolidation in the mobile advertising space, which began back in 2009 with Google’s $750m buyout of AdMob, followed the next year by Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless, which became iAds. The process of consolidation seems to be accelerating, and last year saw Millennial buying Jumptap, Twitter buying MoPub and Amobee buying Gradient X, among others.

For more, go to bit.ly/MMMPubmatic

JUNE 2014

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Tesco Announces Hudl Phone UK supermarket chain Tesco revealed it will be following last year’s Hudl tablet with a second model in September, and a matching own-brand smartphone that it plans to launch by the end of the year.

The Hudl smartphone, which like its predecessor will run a forked version of Android, is expected to feature comparable specs to Samsung’s Galaxy S5 handset at an entry-level price. Tesco’s priority doesn’t seem to be making money from selling the device itself as much as through the Tesco services that come pre-installed on the device, including its Blinkbox media service, apps for buying groceries and clothing, and access to

Tesco’s digital banking service.

When it comes to bricks-and-mortar retailers on mobile, Tesco is leading the pack.

A Search Agency report at the end of February claimed that the supermarket has the most complete mobile experience of any FTSE 100 brand in the UK. It is also set to launch an app which will enable users to scan and pay for items in-store on their smartphone, as the next evolution of its self-service tills and ‘Scan as you Shop’ handsets, and is looking ahead to the future with the launch of a virtual store for the Oculus Rift VR headset.

For more, go to bit.ly/MMMTesco

Facebook Launches Audience Network At its f8 developer conference on 30 April, Facebook unveiled Audience Network, its long-gestated mobile ad network, which will enable advertisers to place ads on third-party sites and apps, targeted using the social network’s tools and user data.

Audience Network was just one of many mobile-focused announcements made at f8.

Perhaps most notably, Facebook answered criticims that it is too loose with member’s private info with the introduction of personalised and anonymous login, enabling users to tie apps to Facebook while controlling how much data to share.

Other announcements at the conference included AppLinks, a way of deeplinking

between apps; a move into push notifications with the launch of Parse Push; and FbStart, which offers up to $30,000 of free tools and services to help developers get their app up and running.

There were a broad range of announcements, but they had one major theme in common: mobile. Understandable, given that on 24 April, Facebook reported a 34 per cent year-on-year increase in mobile Monthly Active Users (MAUs) in its Q1 results for the quarter ended 31 March, 2014, with mobile MAUs crossing the 1bn threshold for the first time at 1.01bn, out of a total of 1.28bn MAUs. For more, go to bit.ly/MMMFBnetwork

Samba and Ovivo Close Their Doors The period saw the end of two ad-funded mobile networks in the UK: Ovivo and Samba Mobile.

Ovivo, a Vodafone-powered MVNO that offered users free airtime in exchange for watching an ad every 10 minutes, closed ‘for reasons beyond its control’ in March. The company raised £1m last year, and shortly before its closure revealed it was hoping to raise a further £3m.

At the time of Ovivo’s closure, Mobile Marketing spoke to Samba founder Ben Atherton, who pointed to its “core base of loyal users” and a more effective ad model, which

rewarded users with 3G data in exchange for watching ads at their leisure, as driving its success. A month later, however, Samba had also closed, identifying the rising cost of data from its wholesale partners as the cause.

The value exchange model has had mixed success in Europe. Blyk closed its UK operations in 2009, and Textmedia.biz suffered a similar fate in 2007. But the business model doesn’t seem to be going anywhere – in May, Adpoints brought its incentivised ad service to mobile, rewarding users for watching video ads with Nectar points.

For more, go to bit.ly/MMMvalue

@mmmagtweets

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JUNE 2014

UK Mobile Ad Spend Hits £1bn Mobile ad spend in the UK broke £1bn for the first time in 2013, according to figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and accountancy firm PwC, increasing 93 per cent to £1.03bn.

That’s 16.4 per cent of the £6.3bn spent on all digital advertising, compared to 10 per cent in 2012.

Mobile over-indexes in social media advertising, accounting for 35 per cent of spend (£221.8m), and display, where it makes up 23 per cent (£432.4m). Mobile ad spend overall has been given a major boost by Facebook’s entry into the market.

Warc and the Advertising Association

forecast that total mobile spend will grow to £1.8bn in 2014, or 25 per cent of all digital spend, and £2.6bn in 2015. If this figure is achieved, it would represent a remarkable 5.8 per cent of the UK’s total spend on advertising.

Meanwhile, it’s a similar story in the United States, where figures from the US IAB and PwC revealed that American mobile ad spend stood at $7.1bn (£4.2bn) during 2013. That’s a year-on-year increase of 110 per cent, up from $3.4bn in 2012, and 17 per cent of the overall digital ad spend of $42.8bn – which exceeded broadcast TV advertising revenues ($40.1bn) for the first time ever.

For more, go to bit.ly/MMMAdSpend

Facebook Buys Oculus and Moves Following its WhatsApp acquisition in February, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in his MWC keynote that “after buying a company for $16bn, you’re probably done for a while”, but the social network hasn’t shown much sign of slowing down.

In March, it bought Oculus, developer of the Rift VR headset, for around $2bn. To date, the company has focused on the gaming space, but Facebook announced it has “plans to extend Oculus’ existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education and other areas”.

Less than a month later, it acquired activity tracking app Moves. The amount of location

Google Introduces Wear SDK Google launched the developer preview of Android Wear, an SDK specifically tailored for wearable devices, and in particular smart watches.

The OS enables users to control wearable devices with voice commands, and receive notifications from paired smartphones. That’s not especially groundbreaking, but Google is hoping “to bring a common user experience and a consistent developer platform to this new generation of devices”.

On board as hardware partners are Asus, HTC, Motorola and Samsung – which notably eschewed Android for its latest Galaxy Gear watches in favour of Tizen. Fashion brand

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Fossil Group also committed to releasing Wear-powered smart watches later this year.

Attracting the most attention, though, was the Moto 360 from Motorola, the manufacturer Google sold to Lenovo back in January. Unlike most smart watches we’ve seen previously, the 360 features a circular screen, and can be activated by the user rotating their wrist or speaking the “OK Google…” command. The device is set to go on sale this summer.

To find out more about Google’s activity in this space, turn to page 14 for our feature looking at the wearables market.

For more, go to bit.ly/MMMWear

data collected from the app’s 4m users provoked some concern, but Moves’ statement on the deal claimed that “there are no plans to … commingle data with Facebook”.

The period also saw plenty of acquisitions from the other ‘GAFA’ companies. Amazon bought digital comics app Comixology and Google made acquisitions as diverse as Quest Visual, creator of translation app WordLens, and drone firm Titan Aerospace, bolstering Project Loon’s attempt to improve internet access in emerging markets. As we went to press, Apple confirmed that it had acquired the subscription streaming music service Beats Music and Beats Electronics for $3bn.

For more, go to bit.ly/MMMFBacq

REAL WORLD

JUNE 2014

ON THE BALL

George Cole looks at how this summer’s official World Cup partners are planning to use mobile to leverage their involvement with the event All eyes will be on Brazil this summer, when the FIFA World Cup finals kick off on 12 June. The 2010 World Cup final in South Africa attracted a worldwide TV viewing audience of around 700m, says FIFA, and there’s no reason why this figure shouldn’t be equalled or even bettered in this year’s competition. Many eyes will also be glued to smartphones and tablets as World Cup fever hots up, so it’s little wonder that many brands are excited by the marketing potential offered by the event - and see mobile as one of the best ways of reaching consumers. The rise of mobile and social media since the 2010 World Cup in South Africa has been nothing short of spectacular.

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The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) says there were around 5bn mobile subscriptions globally in 2010; now, the number of mobile subscriptions is 7.3bn, or more than the entire world population.

The Apple iPad was launched in April 2010, just a couple of months before the start of the World Cup, so made little impact on that tournament, but since then, tablets have become one of the fastest-selling consumer devices and have transformed the mobile market. Research organisation Gartner says tablet sales reached 195.4m in 2013.

The concept of second screen is now a reality for many TV viewers, who use their mobile device to supplement their TV

viewing or access social media. The arrival of 4G networks means that content such as streaming media now looks even better on a mobile device, and the number of apps has exploded. Moreover, today’s apps are smarter, better designed and offer more features than those of just a few years ago.

Socially mobile In 2010, Facebook had around 500m active users; today, it has more than 1.2bn, and almost half of Facebook users (556m) access the social media site from a smartphone or tablet. Twitter now has around 241m active users, roughly double the number in 2010.

Football fans love using Twitter: the Euro

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As part of its Brazil 2014 marketing campaign, Coca Cola will be sponsoring World Cup trivia games on QuizUp

2012 final generated 16.5m tweets, peaking at 15,358 tweets per second as the fourth goal went in. Will Scougal, head of brand strategy, Twitter UK, says, “Fans are not just talking about the game; it’s about everything, including Ronaldo’s boots.” This summer, World Cup fans will be using their mobile devices to check scores, find results, chat, comment, and watch video content. With so many eyeballs fixed on smartphone and tablet screens, it’s no surprise that those associated with the World Cup are looking to tap into mobile.

In December 2013, FIFA launched a new app for Brazil 2014 that provided live coverage of the World Cup draw. Since its launch, the app has been downloaded more than 3m times. The app, designed

for both smartphone and tablet, will include up-to-date information and news during the competition, as well as interviews and videos. Official World Cup sponsors, including Castrol, Coca Cola, AB InBev (owner of the Budweiser brand, the official World Cup beer), Sony, Hyundai and Adidas, have also unveiled their plans for mobile.

Coca Cola is planning a real-time marketing campaign that will use up-to-the-minute feedback from fans across 14 platforms during the World Cup. There are also plans to unveil a flag composed of crowdsourced images before the Brazil versus Croatia match. Coca Cola has also teamed up with Plain Vanilla (the company behind QuizUp, the world’s largest trivia game for mobile) to sponsor World

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p has Cup trivia games. QuizUp more than 16m registered users in over 230 countries. The games are social – you compete against others – and QuizUp says users spend an average of 30 minutes playing in the app per day.

Viggo Jonsson, QuizUp vicepresident, business development, says the key to success has been that, “QuizUp p is simple. The user interface is very simple and that’s very important. Everybody likes trivia and we offer so many topics [when QuizUp p launched on the iPhone, it offered 100,000 questions in 300 categories].”

At the time of writing, QuizUp and Coca Cola were finalising the plans for World Cup 2014, but QuizUp says that it plans to offer 40 World Cup topics – one for each competing nation – and that it will be a global project,

All bets are off

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JUNE 2014

With more and more traffic now coming from mobile devices, the ESPN FC website and app have been given an overhaul to allow for a more personalised experience for both the user and advertisers

involving multiple languages. QuizUp has soft-launched the World Cup project, with three trivia topics.

This isn’t the first time QuizUp has forged links with another brand – in April 2014, it launched “Earth From Above”, a branded topic with GoogleMaps. Viggo Jonsson says the experience of Earth From Above showed that it was possible to introduce brand messaging into games, without in any way changing the user experience or affecting the flow of the game. “We got no negative feedback from users,” he adds.

Beer o’clock AB InBev’s World Cup mobile app will help users find the nearest bar showing World Cup matches and selling Budweiser beer. AB InBev is also exploring ways of using its Bar Pass system, launched in 2013, during the World Cup. Bar Pass enables Budweiser drinkers to purchase drinks via their smartphone and avoid queuing at the bar – when the drinks are ready to be collected, a message appears on the user’s phone.

Castrol, meanwhile, will be offering

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The Castrol Index, the official tournament performance ranking, and the official Castrol FIFA World Cup predictor game on FIFA’s mobile website.

Hyundai UK has forged a branded content partnership with Copa90, the largest independent football channel on YouTube.

The collaboration involved Hyundai UK supporting two original Copa90 shows, which included a competition that gave fans a chance to win VIP trips to the World Cup in Brazil.

Hyundai says YouTube research shows that football fans love to be online and that their favourite source of video is YouTube 10.4m British football fans are online and 99 per cent of them use the internet either every day or most days. Some 4.5m football fans are heavy YouTube users, viewing an average of 100 YouTube pages per month. There will also be a second stage to Hyundai UK’s Copa 90 partnership during the World Cup, which will be activated through social media.

Adidas started its mobile World Cup presence with the launch of its World

Cup Live Wallpaper and Widget app. The app includes a short animation, which takes users from outer space down to Earth, and onto the Maracanã Estádio stadium’s centre circle, to reveal Brazuca, the official match ball. The Live wallpaper includes all of the competing nation’s flags. Additional updates and activations are planned for when the domestic football season finishes at the end of May and will roll out across the 18 days between then and the start of the tournament.

Adidas says that, in addition to mobilespecific content, every digital experience the company is creating is mobile-optimised.

Adidas also plans to create content that can be shared on multiple platforms, including mobile devices.

Sony’s SmartBand fitness tracker, along with SmartWatch 2 phone remote for Android smartphones, are official World Cup smartphone accessories. A new app will be available through Sony’s Xperia Lounge app, that provides fans with World Cup alerts, updates and news. Sony Xperia also ran a competition offering footie fans the chance to win World Cup tickets on Twitter.

Network operator 02 is planning a World

‘Sports fans have always been early adopters of technology, and they are increasingly mobile’ Charley Classen, vice president and general manager, ESPN EMEA

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Cup campaign through its The Sun+ Goals service, which is free to all consumers who upgrade to 4G for up to 12 months. The service can also be received free for one month through 02 Priority Moments. The app gives users access to The Sun’s match coverage, as well as journalists’ blogs from Brazil, and also offers goals, highlights, news, fixtures and video.

Mobile TV Broadcasters covering the World Cup also have plans for mobile, including ESPN FC. “Mobile is of paramount importance to ESPN, and we employ a mobile-first strategy in the development of our digital products and content around the world,” says Charly Classen, vice president and general manager, ESPN EMEA. “Sports fans have always been early adopters of technology, and they are increasingly mobile. They want their information anytime, anywhere, and in a way that doesn’t just work with their particular device – but is a great experience on it.”

He adds that in the US, the majority of ESPN’s usage is mobile. “In the UK, we have very high engagement on mobile, and a fastgrowing reach. In fact, we have enjoyed very strong growth globally in recent years – with 2013 seeing 41 per cent growth in minutes and 24 per cent growth in visits for ESPN mobile properties around the world.”

The SportsCenter, ESPN FC and ESPN UK apps allow fans to access the latest scores and news about their favourite teams or sports with a single touch. Users can also share content, watch video within the app – and in some markets, view live events.

Classen says, “Mobile has a very important role in our marketing. Our ability to personalise experiences for sports fans and deliver engaging experiences with ESPN content enables us to provide the same for advertisers. We work with advertisers to execute innovative campaigns locally, globally or across a collection of regions. We can do that across an individual platform – for example, mobile – across an individual sport – such as football – or a combination of platforms and sports.”

Bimal Kapadia says ESPN FC’s mobile plans for the World Cup are “extensive”, starting with a new ESPN FC app and a

Football fans now want access to up-to-date information any time, any place and the ESPN FC app allows them to access the latest scores, stats and news with a single touch

sleeker website. The site is designed to respond to all screens, and platforms.

On a mobile device, the site behaves in an “app-like” manner, with scrolling menus, smooth navigation and transitions between content pieces. Content will include live scores, news, feature stories, video, audio, photos, stats and graphics, polls, and more.

All aspects of the website will be socially shareable with one touch, and both the website and app will offer personalisation features. “Where we are a rights holder (the US and Brazil) it will also integrate our WatchESPN service for viewing live events,” Kapadia adds.

Share and share alike “It’s going to be a social World Cup, whether that’s players, teams or fans tweeting or Facebooking,” says Stephen Poole, ITV’s multiplatform group sales controller, “and our World Cup site has been designed to receive traffic from social media and make it easy to share.” Poole says there are two main areas to ITV’s World Cup strategy. The first involves the ITV Player streaming video service, which allows mobile users to watch games on their mobile phone or tablet. “Around 230,000 people streamed the Euro 2012 final live, and 40 per cent of them watched it on a mobile device,” notes Poole.

The second area involves ITV’s World Cup site, which caters for PC users, but has

been optimised for mobile. The site will include exclusive content, such as video clips and behind-the-scenes footage, some of which will not be available on the main TV broadcast. In the run-up to the game, there will be football-themed tests and quizzes.

There will also be a chance to participate in a number of second-screen activities during games, many of them lighthearted, such as testing your football knowledge against a Brazilian Toucan, and then sharing your results on social media. Another activity lets mobile users try their hand at taking a free kick, by using their fingers to kick and curl a ball around a wall.

ITV also hopes to run innovative advertising campaigns with some brands, making use of the second screen, and audio recognition technology from Shazam.

Based on previous major events, it’s fair to assume that the BBC will offer video streams of live games to which it has rights, for all types of screens, including smartphone and tablet. The BBC sport site will also offer radio, text commentary and statistics alongside video highlights and social media, again optimised for all screen sizes. Content can be accessed via a web browser, or from a smartphone or tablet app.

The message is clear: if brands and advertisers play their cards right when it comes to mobile, there could be plenty of winners at this year’s World Cup finals.

@mmmagtweets

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JUNE 2014

WEAR NEXT?

As the buzz around wearable technology builds, Alex Spencer takes a look at the nascent market, and asks what it will take for these devices to break into the mainstream So far in 2014, we’ve seen Facebook buy virtual-reality headset maker Oculus Rift for $2bn (£1.2bn), Google launch a dedicated OS for smartphones and work with Ray-Ban maker Luxottica to create a more fashionable version of its smart glasses, and wearable product launches from Samsung, Sony, LG and just about any big manufacturer you could name – plus a few you’ve probably never heard of.

This year is shaping up to be the Year of Wearables, but before we get caught up in all the hype, it’s important to ask: what exactly is wearable technology? The answer to that question isn’t as simple as you might expect.

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“Wearables are not a homogenous group,” says Forrester senior analyst Anthony Mullen.

The term covers an ever-growing number of device categories, but the core idea is the same across the board. The smartphone was revolutionary because it brought the computing power and connectivity of desktop to our pockets, and wearables promise to bring that even closer, directly on the user’s body. In most cases, this means taking objects that we already wear and making them ‘smart’ – adding a screen, internet connectivity, and a way to interact with it.

The most common categories of wearable device are: smart glasses, which project an

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interactive virtual display in front of the wearer’s vision; smartwatches, which bring a small-screen version of the smartphone, with limited functionality, to the user’s wrist; and activity trackers, which use an accelerometer to measure things like the wearer’s daily steps and sleep patterns.

These are three very disparate form factors, and they’re just the beginning. At events like CES and MWC, we’ve seen everything from smart onesies to connected toothbrushes.

Who’s who in wearables?

There are a remarkable number of companies, familiar and new, which are already involved

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glasses which can serve up contextual notifications and directions onto a display in the wearer’s peripheral vision, and photograph or film everything they are seeing. The device is still more prototype than product but, having tried out a pair for ourselves, the potential is clear.

Google also recently made steps into the smartwatch market with the launch of Wear, an SDK that adapts its Android OS for watches and other small-screen wearable devices, supported with device announcements from Motorola, HTC and Fossil Group.

Looking even further forward, the company’s experimental Google[x] division is also working on smart contact lenses, initially for medical applications.

Apple – which has previously helped to push computers, digital music players, smartphones and tablets into the mainstream – is also preparing to take its first steps into the market. There’s word of a Healthbook app that works with a wearable device to track the user’s vital signs, which is set to launch with iOS 8. Whether that device turns out to be the long-touted iWatch or something else entirely remains to be seen, but the Apple-Google rivalry that has defined the mobile space will likely soon be extended to wearables too.

It’s not just big names, either. There are plenty of startups making their name with all kinds of wearable devices, from Pebble, which earlier this year opened the first dedicated wearable app store for its range of smartwatches, to Fitbit, which recently saw the companion app for its activity trackers break 1m downloads. in the wearables space. Samsung was the first major manufacturer to bring a smartwatch to market, with its Galaxy Gear. Nike had wearables’ first big success with the Nike+ Fuelband activity tracker in 2012, though it has recently pulled the plug on its wearable hardware department to focus more on the supporting software. You’d have a hard time, however, arguing that any company is bigger in the wearables market right now than Google.

Google Glass, which recently went on limited sale in the US, is currently the nearest thing the wearables industry has to a household name. Glass is a pair of smart

Image problem

INNOVATION

by the big household names, who have a marketing budget to educate consumers that these startups could never dream of.

Part of the problem, however, is with the devices themselves. With the exception of activity trackers – which, not coincidentally, have been the most commercially successful device to date – wearable devices have so far struggled to find their killer app.

“Some of the most compelling use cases are yet to be uncovered,” says Sonny Vu, founder of Misfit, which released its first device, the Shine activity tracker, in 2012 with the help of crowdfunding platform Indiegogo.

“If you think back to 1985, we could not make phone calls on the go; in 1995, it was almost inconceivable to send a message on the go. I keep wondering, what are those use cases that in 10 years’ time we’ll look back and say, ‘can you believe we didn’t even have that in 2014?’”

There are certainly some interesting ideas out there, like Eaze’s ‘Nod to Pay’ solution for Glass, which enables wearers to make Bitcoin payments in-store using a voice command, looking at a QR code to scan it, and then nodding twice. Yet these kinds of use cases are helpful add-ons, rather than a compelling reason for the average person to buy the technology in the first place.

Lack of awareness means niche products like this smart bottle warmer are struggling to find their way into the mainstream

In terms of actual sales volume, though, wearable technology is still a niche market.

Juniper predicts total wearables sales, across all these devices categories, will near 130m in 2018 – a number dwarfed by the 968m smartphones sold last year. A 2013 report from the Consumer Electronics Association showed that just 9 per cent of US consumers are interested in purchasing a smartwatch in the next year.

Right now, one of the biggest factors holding the market back is a lack of awareness.

Most of the smaller companies we spoke to agreed that this was being helped somewhat

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prototype, inspired by ‘luxury Swiss watch brands’ and, unusually, designed specifically for a female audience.

Google has also been trying to tackle the problem, through its partnership with Italian fashion brand Luxottica, and with the appointment of Ivy Ross, a designer who has worked for Disney, Calvin Klein and Swatch, as the head of Glass. Apple seems to be doing the same, with a string of hires last year, poaching talent from the likes of Nike, Yves Saint Laurent and Burberry.

Finding a niche

The biggest barrier to widespread adoption of wearable devices is simply how they look. Samsung’s Galaxy Gear may have led the way in smartwatch technology but not in style

There are also some UI issues to be ironed out. While wearables have a lot in common with mobile, the form factors are completely different. Smartwatches, for example, have a much smaller screen, raising the question of how – and which – information should be presented to the user. It also makes interaction much harder, especially in situations where voice control isn’t an option, though this is an issue companies like Fleksy and 5-Tile are trying to resolve with their streamlined virtual keyboards.

Something wearables do have in common with mobile, however, is the vital issue of battery life. The exact time depends on the complexity of the device – while a simple activity tracker might last a week or so, Google Glass requires daily charging – and, as Misfit’s Vu puts it: “Every time a person has to take your product off, there’s a chance they don’t put it back on.”

Misfit boasts that the Shine can go up to six months between charges, and Vu says that while most early adopters are happy to put up with poor battery life, “that’s only the educated consumers. The ones who are not familiar with this space want to know, why do I have to charge it at all? They’ve never had to charge their watch.”

Probably the single most immediate barrier to widespread adoption is simply how current

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devices look. Google recently acknowledged that “In the future, today’s prototype [of Glass] may look as funny to us as that mobile phone from the mid ‘80s”. Or, as Pebble chief evangelist Myriam Joire puts it: “Most devices today are butt ugly.”

It’s certainly difficult to imagine more fashion-conscious consumers opting to wear the current crop of bulky devices. They have to “either be beautiful or invisible,” according to Misfit’s Vu. Unlike smartphones, which can get away with being fairly anonymous chunks of glass and plastic because they spend most of the time in your pocket, wearables are by definition a fashion item. Also unlike smartphones, smart glasses and watches are competing with existing ‘dumb’ versions from the likes of Rolex, Michael Kors and Armani.

“Most wearable launches we’ve seen have been leaning heavily on the technology,” says Pekka Väyrynen, CEO and co-founder of Creoir, which develops technology for brands on a white label basis. “But I think once you are wearing a device which is visible, like a smartwatch, it has to reflect your personality.

I would argue that, for example, the Samsung Galaxy Gear doesn’t do that. It serves the purpose, but it doesn’t look nice – it looks unfinished.”

We met Väyrynen at MWC, where he was showing off Creoir’s Ibis smartwatch

www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

For now, though, wearables are stuck with this image problem, meaning that so far, the majority of wearables adoption has come from niche markets, most obviously the tech enthusiast crowd. Excited by the potential of these devices, and more willing to look past the current issues, it’s these people who have helped many of the space’s startups get off the

Activity trackers like Misfit’s elegant Shine have been the most commercially successful wearable devices to date

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ground, through campaigns on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Tech lovers aren’t the only early adopters, though. One of the ideas that wearables’ advocates come back to again and again is that, as Intel’s chief futurist Steve Brown puts it, “people use technology to help them be their best selves”.

It’s for this reason that health and fitness has proved one of the biggest markets for wearable products, whether it’s athletes trying to improve their performance, people trying to lose weight, or ‘quantified self’ enthusiasts who want to collect data on everyday activities like walking and sleeping.

Wearables seem to be making their way into every sport imaginable. Take, for example, Vela: a sailing app that will launch with the Recon Jet smart glasses later this year, enabling users to plan and share sailing activities on their tablets. On the water, the glasses are used to display data including speed, heading and weather conditions.

The desire for self-improvement has also driven the development of many products targeting parents and parents-to-be, whether it’s the ‘smart onesie’ being shown by Intel and Rest Devices at this year’s CES, or Aura, an ‘ambient communication’ system that combines a dress for the pregnant mother and a bracelet for the father which can interact when the baby is kicking.

Dwarfing these fairly niche markets, though, is the enterprise space. If we want to use tech to improve our workouts or help us look after our kids, then it makes sense that businesses would want to use wearables to help employees work better, too.

“The key to wearables is making everyday tasks easier and more efficient,” says Dan Cui, VP of business development at Vuzix, which makes smart glasses aimed squarely at the enterprise market. “That’s true of everything from big box retail, where employees on the shop floor could use smart glasses to pull up additional info about an item and then scan the customer’s card to complete the purchase, to warehouse picking.”

Dutch fulfillment company Active Ants recently reported a 15 per cent increase in speed and 12 per cent drop in mistakes made by its workers when it trialled an order picking solution on Glass. Fujitsu has developed a

INNOVATION

Hoping to appeal to a wider market Google Glass has unveiled a range of frames which incorporate the technology into more fashionable glasses and sunglasses

system that pairs a head-mounted display with a glove that uses NFC (Near Field Communication) to identify items and provide the wearer with visual instructions, while Kopin is offering its Goldeni headsets, which have night-vision and thermal view modes, to fire departments, the police and the military.

Not only does enterprise deployment of wearables come with a wide range of practical use cases, it also neatly sidesteps some of the biggest issues for consumers. While the $1,500 (not including tax) that Google is charging for the early Explorer edition of Glass might be offputting to a consumer, that price barrier isn’t such a big issue for businesses confident of the ROI. The clunky appearance of wearables isn’t going to be such a major problem for people who are already dressed in hard hats and hi-vis jackets.

One possible fringe benefit of enterprise adoption is that it could normalise the technology and help warm up the public to the idea of consumer-facing products. Many of the smart glasses companies we spoke to are focusing on enterprise with their initial models, with an eye to targeting consumers with later, sleeker models.

The marketing opportunity Presuming that wearables do take off in the consumer space, what are the opportunities for marketers?

“The main opportunity lies in the persistence and scale of location data,” says Stefan Bardega, head of digital at global agency Mediacom. “There are many examples of location targeting contributing to improved performance in mobile advertising, but the challenge has always been scale. Wearables present an opportunity to address that.”

Wearables could also open up new seams of information that marketers have never had access to before, including biometric and even emotional data. It’s easy to imagine something like neuromarkteting startup Sensum – which has been used by Channel 4 to analyse the reactions of focus groups in real-time, instead of relying on surveys – being incorporated into wearable devices.

With all this data will undoubtedly come a new set of concerns for consumers. Ten years ago, the most sensitive piece of data a brand could want from you was probably your postcode or telephone number. Today, it’s most likely your current location. But

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it’s going to require some serious work to convince people to let companies access a live feed of their vital signs and emotional state.

“Privacy will be the number one issue for marketers, as more sensitive personal data is made available,” says Bardega. “The second is the screen size, which will limit traditional creative approaches.”

Smartwatch displays tend to be under 2in, and most activity trackers communicate with the wearer via a series of lights, meaning a standard banner ad simply won’t be an option.

Smart glasses offer a larger virtual display but, at least for now, Google has banned direct advertising on Glass.

So what are the alternatives? Well, according to Bardega, successful advertising and marketing on wearables “will need to be ‘native’ in every sense: integrated into the experience, useful, timely, and user-initiated”.

One potential model for this is Avocarrot, which presents fitness app users with coupons as a reward for achieving goals in-app.

Imagine receiving a money-off voucher for a bottle of Lucozade after a particularly taxing run, for example. While finding out which marketing strategies do and don’t work is going to be a difficult process, the potential benefits of getting it right are huge.

“The tone of voice on wearables is completely different,” says Eaze co-founder

Raimo Van der Klein. “As a brand, if you do succeed in building a relationship with users here, you will be talking to them in a completely different way. It’s a really intimate relationship.”

In order to build that relationship, marketers are going to have to innovate. So far, the brands who have taken the plunge with wearable marketing have taken a softer approach. Take Durex, which made headlines last year with ‘Fundawear’, smart pants containing a set of mini vibrators which can be controlled remotely via a smartphone app. It’s something of a novelty, but it fits neatly into their brand identity – something Reebok has also attempted with its Checklight skullcap, which features a built-in accelerometer and gyroscope to help athletes measure the severity of head trauma after an impact.

Virgin Atlantic, meanwhile, recently kicked off a six-week trial which equipped its check-in staff at Heathrow airport with Google Glass and Samsung Galaxy Gear.

The devices were used to automatically pull up details about passengers flying with the airline’s Upper Class service and their destination so that staff could greet them personally. Similarly, Disney introduced ‘MagicBands’ in its theme parks and hotels, enabling visitors to get quick admission to parks and rides, pay for purchases directly,

The Nike+ Fuelband activity tracker, launched in 2012, was the first big success in wearable technology

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and unlock the door to their hotel room.

However, it’s worth noting that most of these brands are explicitly positioning themselves as pioneers. Reebok’s head of advanced concepts Paul Litchfield describes Checklight as part of a “legacy of innovation” and Virgin Atlantic launched the trial as part of an effort to “make flying glamorous again”, according to IT manager Tim Graham.

However, to get most brands on board with wearables, there’s got to be a major increase in scale: “We talk to hundreds of brands a month, and they’re not asking about it,” says Urban Airship CMO Brent Heiglekker. “Wearables haven’t come up in most of the conversations we’re having.”

It’s only now, with smartphone penetration approaching a quarter of the global population, that the more risk-averse brands are willing to take the plunge with mobile marketing. There will have to be a serious explosion in user numbers before they take any interest in wearables.

Mainstream adoption The consensus in the industry, though, seems to be that the explosion in numbers is only a matter of time. The first spike in mainstream adoption is generally predicted to be two or three years away, and once people see their friends using these devices, growth is likely to be exponential. That’s as long as the industry can overcome all the obstacles and create a series of products that go beyond novelties and gadgets, that appeal as much to middleaged women as they do to geeky teenage boys.

To make that happen, it’s vital to remember that ‘wearable technology’ is a term of two halves. The ‘wearable’ part – how the devices look, whether they’re comfortable, where they fit into the user’s everyday life – is just as important as the more familiar ‘technology’ part – what the devices are capable of, how powerful the cameras and processors are, how long their batteries last between charges.

It’s a big ask, certainly, and it seems likely that some of the form factors we’re seeing now will fall by the wayside. But if any of them can strike a chord with people the way the iPhone and iPad did, it’s possible that a few years from now, people may feel the same about wearable tech as they currently do about their smartphone: ‘How did I ever live without it?’ MM

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THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

BUCKLEY ON… With the 2014 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards open for business, Russell Buckley offers six rules to follow to increase your chances of winning I’ve been lucky enough to sit on quite a few judging panels for advertising and mobile industry awards. So I thought I would share with you some of key learnings gleaned from over the years. And if you think they all sound a little bit obvious, then why do the vast majority of entrants get them so wrong?

1. Is it really good enough?

Before you even start writing, take a hard look at your campaign. It’s going to be running against the creme de la creme in your industry – does it really make the grade? Like a lot of this article, this sounds bleeding obvious, but you’d be amazed how many entries I see are remarkably ho-hum.

‘No matter how perfect your baby was in the wild, it’s going to live or die based on how good the written entry is’

are well formatted and short (no harm in emphasising the length part again).

Have pity on the judges and if you really can’t communicate why your idea was so brilliant in fewer words, revisit point 1.

3. Results win awards Most awards place an indecent amount of emphasis on the effectiveness of the campaign – including the ones run by this magazine. So if it didn’t work demonstrably well, or you have a hard time proving that it worked, or the client won’t allow you to share how very clever you were, don’t bother entering as you’re not going to win. A common judges’ refrain is “I really like this campaign, but we can’t let it win as we don’t know if it worked or not.”

4. Mind the hyperbole 2. Brevity is best

Remember that any reputable awards programme is going to have hundreds of entries to be sifted through. With the best will in the world, that means that a judge might only have a few minutes to consider your work, certainly in the initial stages. Therefore, you need to invest a lot of time honing and crafting your written entry. No matter how perfect your baby was in the wild, it’s going to live or die based on how good the written entry is.

The easiest entries to judge are those that are brief, use bullet points,

OK, you’re in marketing and understandably a little excitable and very proud of your work. However, this is one case where you need to stand back and let the campaign do the talking. So, please avoid phrases like “The results were simply outstanding/amazing/incredible”. Let the judges decide that for themselves.

While you’re at it, please avoid meangingless waffle. You might think that throwing around phrases like “360 degree granular results” and “synergise sticky niches” impresses your clients (actually it doesn’t, but that’s another story), but it adds nothing in this context.

5. Check and double check “During the 10-week period after that campaign, the brand shot to Number 1 in its category in the UK [GREG - IS THIS RIGHT? CAN YOU GET SOMEONE TO CHECK WITH TARQUIN?] and was seen by millions being eaten by the Queen’s corgis on the 10 o’clock news [DO WE WANT TO SAY THIS? ACTUALLY CAN WE SAY THIS, DON’T WE NEED A ROYAL WARRANT OR SOMETHING?]”.

6. Choose the right category I’ve lost count of the amount of times a fellow judge has sighed theatrically and thrown their hands to the heavens muttering something like “Why? Why? I don’t understand it! If they’d entered into the ‘Best TV Campaign for Dog Food in Serbia’, they’d have walked it. But they went and entered ‘Bravery in Marketing to Koreans.’ Idiots. Next!”

OK, none of this is actually very earth-shattering advice, I know.

Yet if you follow these few simple tips, I promise you that you’ll have an awards entry that will automatically slip into the top 20 per cent. You’ll then stand a good chance of winning with that killer campaign you’re so proud of. See you on a podium sometime.

To enter this year’s Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, head for www.mobilemarketingmagazine. com/awards

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IN PRAISE OF PROGRAMMATIC David Murphy talks real-time bidding and targeting with byyd CEO, Victor Malachard When a company repositions, as Adfonic did earlier this year to transition from an ad network to a programmatic-driven mobile DSP (demand-side platform) and rebrand as byyd, there are inevitably questions around the risks and benefits of doing so.

Yet byyd CEO Victor Malachard is in no doubt it was the right thing to do. “We are 100 per cent vested in programmatic,” he says. “We set up as an ad network, but saw the inventory move from the ad network model into mediation and then on to real-time bidding, so we have been investing in pure programmatic since 2011.

“We fundamentally believe that it is the most efficient way for advertisers to buy audiences, and also, the most efficient way for publications to make their inventory available in the market.”

Confidence Programmatic has been gaining traction in the online world for the past five years, but in the mobile space, it seems to have gone from nowhere to just about everywhere in the past 18 months.

One of the key factors behind its rapid uptake, says Malachard, is that advertisers are gaining

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confidence in programmatic’s ability to deliver the right audiences.

“Increasingly, advertisers are understanding that when there’s a match between their data, second-party data from ad tech, and contextual data from publishers, it means they’ve found the right audience. It’s like a light switching on.

“The algorithms then decide on the value of that impression based on the value of that slot, for that audience, to that advertiser.

So it’s about precise targeting that works and is shown to work, rather than a largely opaque ad network model that only considers blocks of inventory.”

This confidence has spread from the buy to the sell side too. “We recently charted the growth of programmatic inventory coming from the mobile premium sites (see chart) and it isn’t linear: it’s accelerating.”

This, says Malachard, is because publishers can reduce risk through more ways of selling inventory, while still differentiating premium through packages such as sponsorships. In addition, like the buyers, they benefit from the efficiencies of plugging into existing exchanges rather than having to develop bespoke tech solutions.

Programmatic partner So with everyone now jumping on the programmatic bandwagon, how do advertisers, agencies and trading desks choose the right programmatic partner to work with?

“They need to work with someone who has sophisticated technology, because

‘There’s no better way to buy a highly segmented and targeted audience at scale, with full transparency around what you’re buying’ Victor Malachard, CEO, byyd you want to see as many impressions across the market as possible and then optimise against the best performing ones.

This means you need a mobile DSP that is plugged into all the exchanges for maximum reach,” Malachard says.

“But seeing the impression is only half the story. It’s then about bidding on it, and leveraging data to bid intelligently on that impression through incisive algorithms.

We have a number of third-party data

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partnerships we have made available as audience segments to buy against through the platform. The more data sets your platform and algorithms can ingest, the more intelligently you can bid.

“This is complemented by the secondparty data from the ad tech providers, which is where byyd comes in. Through processing billions of mobile ad transactions every week, we form impressions of audiences – for example, the kinds of ads they tend to click, how old they are, their gender, and so on. It’s huge value unlocked from big data.

“In addition to that, clients can layer on their own first-party data. Weve is a good example of this. They have licensed our Madison platform, which they use to buy inventory across the entire market, but they are targeting the audience segments that have been defined across the mobile operators involved in Weve. This is rich, unique, firstparty data that they can leverage securely using our platform, without anyone else being able to access it.”

Strong roadmap The next key factor, says Malachard, is a strong roadmap. “This space does not stand still” he says. “We are constantly evolving our product with new features, and we work closely with our partners so that they can influence how the platform evolves and develops in line with their needs.”

Right now, he adds, the key points of interest on byyd’s roadmap are video, crossscreen and data – namely, helping more clients to leverage their own data in the way that Weve is already doing.

“It makes sense for advertisers to want to track usage across all devices,” says Malachard. “We’re not there yet, but there are a lot of businesses working on getting the right methodology to the required degree of accuracy, and it will help the industry move forward when we do get there.”

As for video, a challenge has been a lack of availability of mobile video inventory through the exchanges. “Mobile video inventory has been around for years of course”, says

BUSINESS MODELS

Malachard, “but until recently you could not buy it through the exchanges. But that’s all changed now; the supply is there and clients are taking to it with great enthusiasm.”

Looking further ahead, Malachard sees a bright future for programmatic. “I firmly believe all media will be traded programmatically in the future,” he says. “Desktop was the first, mobile has embraced it much faster than desktop, and other media will catch up. There’s no better way to buy a highly segmented and targeted audience at scale, with full transparency around what you’re buying.”

When you look at it like that, it’s no great surprise that programmatic is this year’s big thing, and possibly next year’s and the year after’s too. MM

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REAL WORLD

JUNE 2014

THE TRILLION EURO QUESTION:

WHOSE DATA IS IT ANYWAY?

After mass government-spying revelations, ‘leaky apps’ accusations and the discovery of the ‘Heartbleed’ vulnerability, Kirsty Styles investigates the issue of data security to find out if the problem has really moved front and centre for government, business and consumers Data security may not make for the most exciting dinner party conversation, but after the events of recent months, no one could argue it’s not one of the most topical, with mobile taking centre stage in the discussions.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has called indiscriminate smartphone tracking “the biggest debate of the 21st century”, while Chi Onwurah, MP, former head of telecoms technology at Ofcom, and now leader of Labour’s digital government review, told Mobile Marketingg that “mobile is the next big security scandal waiting to happen”.

The American Civil Liberties Union

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(ACLU) is currently suing the US government for its role in mass surveillance, as well as advocating a Fair Data equivalent to the Fair Trade mark for companies. Speaking at a recent event staged by The Economist, t Christopher Soghoian from the ACLU levelled blame at the ad execs who built the big data marketing systems proven to be a key tool for US and UK spies. “I’m not here to tell you what you’ve done is evil,” he told the audience.

“But it is.” And with the EU and US currently reconsidering data protection legislation, the landscape is set to change quite significantly.

“People’s understanding of what can be gathered from mobiles has improved quite

a lot over the last few years,” says Forrester analyst Anthony Mullen. “Data security is now the number two concern for smartphone owners according to TRUSTe – second, of course, to battery life.” It’s the range of data generated by smartphones compared to desktop, he says, that has companies rubbing their hands but consumers wringing theirs.

Even young people, often perceived as indifferent, are becoming increasingly worried. Research from youth marketing specialists Voxburner found that 67 per cent of 16-24 year olds consider security their number one concern when buying an internet-connected device. But Luke Mitchell,

JUNE 2014

right, that will hinder growth. Third parties basically don’t care. From the conversations I have, it’s clear they’re just not getting it. So brands have to put pressure on them. Future mobile services need to move to prediction but brands have to be clear and transparent about who they’re sharing with.”

Privacy is the new green

The value of personal data is increasing as Facebook’s purchase of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp indicates

head of insight at Voxburner, says: “Yes, young people are aware of data privacy issues and are concerned about the misuse of their data, but there is also a sense of acceptance and powerlessness among them.”

“When WhatsApp was bought by Facebook it was making no serious revenue, so the purchase price indicated that the social network was buying the OTT messaging service based on the value of each user,” says McAfee’s EMEA CTO Raj Samani. “That works out at about $40 each, compared to around $30 when it bought Instagram and $20 when Google purchased YouTube.” The value of personal data is increasing, Samani argues, but the perceived value among ordinary people is decreasing. “We’ve actually seen people give away their personal data for chocolate.”

Put simply, Forrester’s Mullen believes that: “Privacy policies have to be written so a grandmother could understand them. Brands should not be scared of asking for lots of data, but obviously if they don’t get data handling

Aurelie Pols has been working in data analytics for a decade and sold her first startup to what is now Digitas LBi. She is based in Spain (which has handed out 80 per cent of the EU’s total data protection fines to date) where she leads an analytics company and specialist law firm Mind Your Data. If data is the new oil, Pols declared during a recent webinar with CoolaData, then privacy is the new green.

“Certain industries, like advertising, have this weird sensation that giving customers choices will make them lose money,” she told Mobile Marketing. g “That’s not really the case.

And the industry doesn’t seem to know how to ask for consent: ‘No let’s not ask them, let’s just take the data and say nothing’.”

More than simply not knowing how to ask for permission, Forrester’s Mullen says that those in the industry, particularly ad networks, “have their fingers in their ears”.

He continues: “Ad networks are invested in capturing a lot of local data, often employing obtuse ways of finding out what consumer identities are. Marketers and vendors will just capture as much as they possibly can and work out what to do with it later. There needs to be better planning on data need and for who capturing and measuring data is going to benefit. App developers are likewise being greedy and capturing as much as they can.”

“There is an issue with third parties in the supply chain and the obvious one is advertising, where there’s a mesh of different data flows going on,” echoes Simon Rice, group manager for technology at the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

“When you click on a URL, so many decisions are going on in the background to make the decision on which ad to serve – and you can’t predict at present where that data will go.”

REAL WORLD

The ACLU’s Soghoian flagged data brokers as a potential loose cog in the big data machine, naming the likes of Acxiom, which works with everyone from Google to Microsoft to tie up in-store and digital purchasing data. “You quickly run into organisations that don’t have a brand that can be damaged. If a third party misuses or loses data – who will be held accountable?”

Acxiom now runs a service that enables users to find out what data it holds on them (aboutthedata.com). You just have to enter a load of personal details to get started… Needless to say, Acxiom CEO Scott Howe favours self-regulation and brands the US Rockefeller data bill currently going through Congress as worse than the worst parts of Obamacare.

Heartbleed The high-profile ‘Heartbleed’ security flaw could have allowed hackers to access passwords and other supposedly encrypted data.

The ICO’s Simon Rice says that those targeting it would have had to be very lucky to get anything other than “a big blob of data”, but nevertheless, this was a serious hole in the opensource code Open SSL used by everyone from Google, to Amazon and Rackspace to secure their vast infrastructure.

As a not-for-profit project with only one full-time employee, the Open SSL team has now successfully lobbied

The industry’s attention has now turned to encryption as the ‘surefire’ way to protect data

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The Financial Times created this data calculator so users could see how valuable their data was to marketers: the more specific and detailed the information, the more the data was worth

the big companies that use its software to contribute to its future success. Rice doesn’t advocate closed networks, but with everyone from the FT to the BBC advocating open source, he simply asks: “Should companies have done a bit more code review from an organisational perspective?”

The industry’s attention has now turned to encryption as the ‘surefire’ way to protect data. Forrester’s Mullen says that they’re expecting to see more encryption tools – possibly even something from smartphone OS owners who were annoyed at how their data has been commandeered by security services. “It’s quite a lid that’s been lifted and it’s good for the health of the web,” he adds.

“The maths for encryption works,” Rice agrees. “The problem is it’s got to be implemented properly. If the data is secure in transit but then stored in plain text at the other end, the encryption was bulletproof – but the implementation wasn’t. My concern on the app side of things is that any app developer could just grab a code library from somewhere online, with no idea where the code came from and no due diligence process that they can explain to the user.”

McAfee says it finds 39,000 new malware threats every single day, housing more than 40m of them in its purpose-built ‘zoo’. The data revolution, Samani says, has been led by those offering ‘Hacking as a Service’, and the opportunity to rent malware or find it open source and learn how to use it by watching

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videos on YouTube. If robbing banks was high risk with potentially no reward, the move towards cyber criminality is, arguably, just good business sense.

Data first So what if your company is built solely on the use of data? The recently launched Cloze app has been developed specifically to help professionals manage the “novel a day” of social information they now receive as part of modern working life. Users sacrifice their personal information in order for Cloze’s algorithm to prioritise all the messages coming into their various inboxes and streams, with a premium service that adds extra features.

The company’s co-founder Alex Cote says accessing customer data is the “nature of the beast”, but as companies have been criticised for storing personally identifiable information in plain text, he explains how Cloze has been built with security and privacy baked in. “The team has built Cloze so that data is encrypted in our database so even employees can’t access it. Cloze doesn’t share any details across different users’ accounts and our security pledge, found easily on the company website, explains that data will not be sold or shared with advertisers.”

It’s not just startups that are making huge efforts to collect and analyse customer data in order to engage users, upsell services and attract advertisers. “Data is at the heart of the FT’s T strategy,” says Kristina Eriksson, head of

media relations at the FT. T “It gives us a deeper understanding of our audience and facilitates smarter product development and marketing.”

The FT T famously rejected a presence in Apple’s App Store in order to have full visibility and control over customer data. “Because our mobile app is web-based, we are able to apply the same analytics as on desktop to campaigns on this platform, on- and offline, unlike pure ‘native’ offerings,” Eriksson says.

This strategy doesn’t seem to have hurt, with mobile accounting for nearly a quarter of all new subscriptions and overall digital subscriptions to FT.com growing 31 per cent during 2013 to represent almost two-thirds of the publisher’s total paying audience.

“Our focus is on using engagement data intelligently to correlate the amount of time a brand message is exposed to our audience with the outcomes of the campaign. By matching a client’s content to FT T articles through FT Smart Match we can improve campaign performance significantly.”

Eriksson says that the FT T works hard to ensure data protection is built into its products from the start and the company collaborates closely with technology and network providers to address any potential risks. No individual data is available internally, she adds, with analysis only made around general demographic cohorts.

Inrix, a big data company working on building a huge ‘population analytics’ platform, is currently partnering with Havas on a smart city project in Oxford - a brief that seems somewhat out of the usual territory for a media agency. The project has been devised

by Havas’ new chief data officer Mike Potts, who became the company’s first ever CDO back in February. He says he was appointed “to send a message to the market that we’re really serious about this”.

Matt Simmons, director of marketing for EMEA at Inrix, believes that data analysis is crucial to 21st century business. “Big data and the analysis of that data is a catalyst for creating new and innovative services that can provide real value across a number of sectors,” he says. “Companies that use data to deliver better insights to customers and decision-makers stand a greater chance of differentiating themselves from competitors

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The Cloze app collects and analyses your email history and social feeds, giving each of your contacts a Cloze Score

and driving their business forward in this technology-driven age.”

No data?

Far from the smart use of data helping good companies distinguish themselves from the rest, some in the industry now believe that a full-blown ‘no data’ policy could start to be the true differentiator, identified as a trend to watch for 2014 by TrendWatching.com: “Brands will have to walk a fine line between offering consumers a valuable (and ideally seamless) service, and freaking them out with aggressive if not downright scary ‘services’. Yes, consumers want to feel served, but they don’t like to be watched.”

“Online services are actually starting to use privacy to promote their brand,” ICO’s Rice flags. “Microsoft has just announced that they won’t do any targeted advertising for education products – now Google say they will do the same thing.” Pols welcomes this, adding: “I hope this means that in the future it’s going to be a more egalitarian battle than what it is now. I’d actually like services to allow me to pay but they say ‘this is not our business model’ but this ‘free economy’ really gives people no choice. You should be able to pay for stuff to keep your data private.”

In a landmark decision, the EU has now ruled that Google users have the ‘right to be forgotten’, with the search engine now facing an administrative task of truly unknown complexity and scale to adhere to this.

Short of creating a full Digital Magna Carta, something father of the internet Tim BernersLee demanded on the 25th anniversary of his invention, Europe has already begun the long process of revising its entire 1995 Data Protection Directive.

This is already tabled to include a more wide-ranging ‘right to be forgotten’ and while most of our commentators believe the new rules are going to be a positive thing, McAfee’s Samani says that any legislation brought in to protect citizens, and brands, from the threat of data loss, has to be realistic. “The ‘right to be forgotten’ is technically impossible. You have a digital tattoo once your data goes out there and once your data’s gone it’s gone.”

Pols believes that given that data is transferred from one continent to another at the click of a mouse, the only way to move forward is to have global data protection legislation. “The US and UK get stuck with the word ‘privacy’ and as long as we find it difficult to define privacy, we can’t legislate for it. Data protection, favoured in the rest of the EU, is something totally different.

Internationally, in the last six months alone, it feels like the Americans are starting to align with this. It’s certainly better than two years ago where in the US the attitude was ‘privacy is dead, just get over it’.”

“Europe’s going to lead this – spurred by legislation and informed by the continent’s recent history of fascism – and completely redrawing engagement lines between brands and consumers,” Mullen adds. “And the press will have a field day when the flood gates are open - way more than the EU cookie law.

There will be a lot of pressure from journalists to get brands to change their behaviour.”

But with parliament being dissolved, ahead of the 22 May elections, until June, the revised legislation is unlikely to come in any time soon, points out Simon Rice at the ICO. “The current justice commissioner Viviane Reding might not be commissioner anymore so it could be another couple of years before the legislation comes out of

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the EU. Then it needs to filter through into UK legislation.”

Before the final scope of the legislation has been fully outlined, it has already been slammed by the Network Advertising Initiative, which looks after opt-outs for targeted digital ads, and the Direct Marketing Association for being bad for business.

My data?

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has estimated that the personal data economy could be worth £1trillion (£820bn) in Europe by 2020, roughly 8 per cent of the combined GDP of the EU-27 countries. “For European businesses and governments, the use of personal data will deliver an annual benefit of £330bn by 2020, bringing growth to an otherwise stagnant economy,” a BCG report says. In its survey of 10,000 people worldwide, 78 per cent said they would use tools to control personal data if available.

“Companies that excel at creating trust should be able to

Using the Cloze Score the app prioritises messages, based on who is most relevant to you

@mmmagtweets

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JUNE 2014

that is soon to report on its findings. “I worry about how we educate individuals of what the additional risks are around giving people a full transcript in readable format of their personal data,” admits the ICO’s Rice. “Scammers and spammers will be onto this as well.”

The Government has wholeheartedly joined the open data revolution, even giving £10m grant funding to London’s Open Data Institute, but questions remain around what political involvement does to the neutrality of data collection and dissemination. Plans to sell off NHS data have been “mishandled”, according to the chair of the panel set up to advise ministers on the governance of patient information, while HMRC’s plan to sell off its data has been branded “borderline insane” by Conservative MP David Davis.

Trust Cloze co-founder Alex Cote says accessing customer data is the “nature of the beast”, but as companies have been criticised for storing personal information in plain text, Cloze has been built with security and privacy baked in

increase the amount of consumer data they can access by at least five to 10 times.”

Given the value now placed on data, some are currently working towards offering citizens a way to actively sell this ‘new asset type’ and reap the revenue rewards themselves. Companies like Handshakes and Datacoup have begun to offer this on their own data marketplaces, but personal data on its own, as opposed to within a group of people ‘like’ you, appears to offer little value.

The FT’s T interactive tool ‘How much is your data personal data worth?’ explains that data brokers already know your age, gender, postcode, ethnicity and education level, all worth a sum total $0.007. If you casually throw in that you’re a millionaire, that figure only goes up to $0.123.

Some individuals are now testing the power that the internet has over your data.

Internet activist Shawn Buckles sold all of his personal records for £288 in a bid to highlight data security issues. He states on his website: “Privacy is gone. We gave it up, for no other reason but the thought that it’s useless. Why don’t we protect our rights?” Buckles was quickly followed on this mission by mum-tobe Janet Vertesi, who recently went to extreme lengths to hide her pregnancy from big data and was flagged as a criminal along the way.

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The UK government’s own Midata project is also working on ways for citizens to access and use their data for civic services.

“The Midata programme is a voluntary programme working with companies in key sectors of the economy: energy, personal current accounts, debit cards and credit cards,” says Gemma Lobb from the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, which is backing the work. “The Government is focusing on the areas where the data that the companies hold have the most value for consumers either in terms of giving them access to the type of information that will help the consumer make an effective switching choice or where there is the potential for the data to drive services to empower the consumer in other ways.”

People will eventually be able to download a transcript of their data and use it as part of the personal data economy, which is great if you trust the Government to help you manage your personal details. According to BCG, government is less trusted than brands on data management. The programme itself does not have access to any data, Lobb explained, it’s working with brands so that they are encouraged to give back certain data they hold on their customers. Midata recently set up a consumer protection and trust work stream

Although a complex area, it appears that words like transparency and consent are coming into everyday vocabulary for marketers, policymakers and citizens, with seductive opportunities to collect data becoming weighed against the potential to leave people feeling betrayed.

“Phase one was all about snooping – which was a great advantage for advertisers,” Forrester’s Mullen concludes. “In phase two we’re seeing more awareness and more controls. But we need to go through this to realign. Phase three will see much more automation, around wearables and contextual services, when people trust brands to do this for them. The nirvana of deeper, richer services will not come until we go through this pain.

“Privacy really is just a subset of this bigger topic – trust,” he adds. “Trust is a much more positive thing to hang this change in the way that we use data on and I want to see this reframed as the trust debate.”

So it looks like we are in a transition.

But we – consumers, government and business – are yet to really start talking to each other about, and truly understanding the consequences of, smartphone tracking, as Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger urges, less still the complexities of a full-blown debate about trust. And without this, yet more scandals, either through intention or oversight, are no doubt on their way. MM

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JUNE 2014

LIGHTS, CAMERA,

MOBILE Alex Spencer looks at how the movie industry is using mobile to promote its wares

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for themselves online.

The marketing campaign for Paramount’s Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues last year attracted nearly as much attention as the film itself. Viral videos and tie-in products – including a fictional autobiography and ‘Scotchy

But what about mobile?

Is it receiving the same kind of careful attention – and the accompanying budget – as more traditional marketing channels?

“It’s very rare and counterintuitive nowadays to see a new movie release that does not have a mobile strategy attached to it,” says Millennial Media EMEA managing director Zac Pinkham.

Post-click action The figures certainly back him up.

In 2013, Entertainment overtook Retail to become the single biggest vertical on Millennial’s mobile ad platform, with cinema and DVD releases making up 45 per cent of campaigns within the category. Unsurprisingly, the post-click action most commonly included in these campaigns was to watch a video, featuring in 53 per cent of film campaigns.

Even more importantly, movie-goers seem eager to consume this content.

Entertainment advertisers saw an average 250 per cent boost in CTR (clickthrough rate) on Millennial’s platform when ads incorporated rich-media content,

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One thing that really does sell mobile over desktop to studios is that, while you can efficiently deliver strong results in terms of cost-per-view, desktop ad units often play below the fold with their audio off, so that users scroll down the page and realise there’s a trailer which is already halfway finished,” says Odyssey managing director Chris Gale. “With mobile, even though it’s a smaller display, video tends to be viewed fullscreen in a native player.”

While film trailers are undeniably the bread and butter of film marketing, it’s not the only kind of rich media available to film companies advertising on mobile.

“Mobile advertising is a very effective way for studios to promote their new movies,” says Millennial’s Pinkham.

“There are a number of factors that encourage and drive direct consumer interaction with an ad – including pinpointing location in correlation to a cinema, mobile video in the promotion of trailers, mCommerce in driving ticket sales, and gamification to support the promotion of new releases.”

Joe Evea, commercial director, Digital Cinema Media

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Social media One of the mobile-centric channels which film studios have been most keen to embrace is social media. It’s hard to find a major release which doesn’t have an accompanying Facebook page and Twitter account. One good, recent example is The Lego Movie, which let people vote for the ‘Lego fan of the week’, reposted pictures of fans posing with the film’s cut-out posters and pushed followers to a microsite – unfortunately, not optimised for mobile – where they could design their own Lego figure.

Social media isn’t all about maintaining a presence on Facebook and Twitter, however.

The Ben & Jerry’s ‘Scotchy Scotch Scotch’ flavour, tying into the second Anchorman film, was one of the very first native ads to appear on Instagram in 2013, reaching 9.8m 18-35 year olds in the US over the course of eight days. Similarly, last year – when Tumblr introduced its ‘sponsored post’ native ad format on mobile last year – 16 of the year’s top 40 most successful posts were

promoting film releases. The single most popular sponsored post was an animated gif featuring one of the Minion characters from Despicable Me 2, which attracted almost 322,000 comments, likes and reblogs from Tumblr users.

Universal Pictures has found a whole host of ways to promote the Despicable Me series on mobile, most of them leveraging these beloved Minion mascots. In Europe, Clear Channel ran a mobile-controlled digital outdoor campaign on its network of screens in shopping centres. A call to action invited passers-by to ‘command the Minions’ using their smartphone. By texting a short code or using a web app users could tell the characters to ‘dance’, ‘hug’ or do one of over 30 actions in order to trigger a relevant on-screen animation.

As well as the primary app for the film, which offers a collection of ringtones and animated wallpapers featuring the Minions, Universal launched tie-in game Minion Rush – the 10th most downloaded free app on iOS

in 2013 – and partnered with Zynga for the much-anticipated launch of Draw Something 2. The game featured a sponsored pack of Despicable Me-themed words for users to draw, as well as a challenge that unlocked additional content once the app reached 2m drawings of the Minions – which took only a matter of days.

Twentieth Century Fox used a similar strategy to promote the launch of Rio back in 2011, incorporating the film’s characters and settings into Angry Birds Rio, the third instalment in Rovio’s incredibly successful mobile game series.

Pre-launch isn’t the only time that tie-in apps can be useful, of course. Earlier this year, NBCUniversal launched Beyond The Screen, a second-screen app which syncs up trivia and other bonus content with selected films.

Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s ‘Cornetto Trilogy’ (Shaun of The Dead, Hot Fuzzz and The World’s End) d were first to get the Beyond the Screen treatment. The earliest of these films was released in cinemas all the way back in 2004. NBCUniversal declined to comment, but presumably it chose these films because their cult following means they’ll have a long life beyond the cinema on DVD.

Mobile ticketing

Second-screen support is a growing trend in the movie industry - syncing up trivia and other bonus material with selected films - and film studios are exploring innovative new ways of bringing such features to the film lover

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These are fine examples of a softer branding approach, but mobile also offers a unique opportunity to ‘close the loop’, according to Odyssey’s Gale: “Where mobile is seeing a particular value for film advertisers is in the opportunity, immediately after the user has viewed an ad, to deliver geotargeted information which tells them that the next showtime is 6pm at the Odeon down the road, and give them the opportunity to book tickets directly on their mobile” he says. “This enables us to attribute the performance on advertising down to not only video views, but ticket sales too.”

Cinema booking site Fandango, which is owned by NBCUniversal, saw a 57 per cent increase in mobile ticket sales between 2012 and 2013. It doesn’t share exact figures, but smartphones and tablets accounted for 40 per cent of the tickets sold in 2013, and its app was

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downloaded 39m times over the course of the year. An impressive number.

These sales don’t necessarily need to be driven through display ads – in December, cinema chain Vue launched a tablet version of its monthly print magazine, augmented with video and audio content. Most importantly of all, every single article and advert features a button to book tickets for the relevant film, or to be alerted when tickets go on sale. It’s a great example of how traditional marketing materials can be brought to life – and put to work as a direct-response tool – with the added functionality mobile offers.

Audio watermarking Digital Cinema Media (DCM), which sells 80 per cent of the cinema advertising market in the UK, is trying to work the same kind of magic for film posters and trailers with its Cinime app.

Cinema-goers spend an average 17 minutes in the foyer before and after watching a film, according to research from the UK’s Cinema Advertising Association. Cinime is an attempt to capitalise on this time, by making it possible to scan posters and recognise trailers using audio watermarking, then deliver additional content to the user’s phone.

“We are only ever going to serve ads that link directly to what’s on screen,” says DCM commercial director Joe Evea. “Also, we don’t want to alienate the audience by saying everyone has to get their phones out in the cinema. The idea is to offer a more passive connection. So if I’m watching an ad from Sky, or a trailer from Fox, and I haven’t got the app open, the experience is the same. But if I do, I might get three extra minutes of content, or maybe a voucher for the DVD.” DCM has been running small-scale trials with brands for over a year, and it’s reporting strong results. A test campaign for Domino’s, which ran in 11 Odeon sites, let users access a voucher for a half-price pizza. The offer didn’t kick in until the following Tuesday at 6pm, at which point the app sent a notification to those who had scanned the ad in the cinema.

DCM says Domino’s saw a 40 per cent uptake for the promotion.

Film studios, large and small, have been keen to embrace social media, growing a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. Effective use of social media can have a serious impact on a film’s success

The campaign had no direct link to film at all, though, and this seems to be the case with most of the brands DCM has brought on board so far. It’s worked with the likes of Ben & Jerry’s, BMW and PlayStation, but if you go to a cinema and look around the lobby or watch the ads before a film, one of the biggest advertisers is the film industry itself.

“The real opportunity is film distribution,” Evea acknowledges. “70 per cent of people who buy a DVD have seen the film in cinema.

If you use Cinime to register a user’s interest in a particular movie, and give them the opportunity to automatically put the release date in their calendar, you gain some sort of control over that behaviour.

“For us, we’re a cinema advertising company, but the potential here is much bigger. Cinime is about making cinema a more engaging experience for consumers and a more seamless opportunity for the film distributors to reach them while they’re there.”

Currently, if users try to book cinema tickets through Cinime, they’ll be redirected out of the app to a mobile website, but

DCM’s long-term vision is to integrate its functionality directly into the apps of each participating cinema chain, where it can sit alongside showtimes and ticket booking inapp. If it can pull off this trick of successfully embedding itself in cinema-goers’ behavioural habits, Evea believes “it’s not too much of a step to say that you can do this in the cinema, but it actually works for any film content you see outside of that”.

And that’s where those bus posters, billboards and TV trailers start to link back to mobile. It’s an opportunity to close the loop, not just on mobile itself but across the board.

All channels will be made more accountable by linking them directly to the purchase of a ticket and the opportunity to follow up nine months down the line with an offer for the DVD when it’s released.

For that to happen, though, DCM’s Cinime would have to take off with users in a big way.

It’s far from the only attempt to deeply engage film fans on the mobile stage, though, and if there’s one thing you can rely on Hollywood for, it’s a happy ending. MM

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PROGRAMMATIC JUNE 2014 BUYING

MAKING SENSE

MAKING SENSE Ahead of our first two Making Sense events taking place in London on 11 June, where we will demystify modern marketing techniques, we present exclusive content from our event sponsors to set the scene for each event

Programmatic Buying 36 Made for Mobile

Amobee CTO Gil Sheinfeld explains how programmatic buying is revolutionising mobile advertising

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The Practical Programmatic Nexage CMO Victor Milligan offers a beginner’s guide to programmatic

Proximity Marketing 40 Retail Revolution

MobPartner CEO Djamel Agaoua explains how new tech is helping retailers win their customers’ hearts and minds

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Shining Light Jess Stephens, co-founder of TagPoints looks at how beacons can be deployed to give retailers better insight into their customers’ in-store activities For more information about the Making Sense events, head for www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/makingsense @

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MAKING SENSE

JUNE 2014

MADE FOR MOBILE

Gil Sheinfeld, CTO at Amobee, considers the key factors that have contributed to the unstoppable rise of programmatic Over the past 18 months, the prominence of programmatic buying on mobile has skyrocketed. In fact, Magna Global estimates that overall programmatic ad spend will reach more than $33bn (£20bn) by 2017. While programmatic has grown steadily in importance for online advertising over the past five years, the speed with which the advertising community has adopted mobile is nothing short of astonishing.

Astonishing, but explainable.

There are a few key factors behind programmatic’s rapid uptake on mobile. The important difference is that on mobile, publishers have been much less reluctant to put their inventory into programmatic exchanges and networks.

The online world was a world of traditional media companies who mainly used programmatic to offload unsold inventory. On mobile, however, the inventory mainly comes from app developers who know that they need to look outside their own organisation to generate revenues.

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Monetising inventory where programmatic has been recognised as a way of monetising massive amounts of inventory quickly. The captive audience on mobile, combined with great data, has led advertisers to see programmatic buying on mobile as a much more effective way to identify and engage audiences.

There was an initial hiatus for many data vendors and platforms as they moved away from cookie-based marketplaces, and struggled to optimise for mobile’s cookie-less environment. In the last six months, however, we have seen a massive uptake of third-party data, and this has dramatically improved data quality on mobile. This improved data layer is fuelling the evolution of mobile programmatic, because advertisers can now target mobile audiences in a highly contextual way. Programmatic buying on mobile also provides advertisers with immense access to a critical inventory source: mobile apps.

In addition, the emergence of the Open RTB protocol as the de facto standard for trading programmatic inventory makes it much easier for players in the ecosystem to connect. In turn, this common trading protocol creates greater liquidity in the market. But we’re not over the finishing line yet. There is definitely room for improvement in the standardisation of metrics and measurement. In comparison to desktop, there are discrepancies between how different

‘Programmatic buying on mobile is a much more effective way to identify and engage audiences’ Gil Sheinfeld, CTO, Amobee mobile ad servers, DSPs (demand-side platforms) and ad exchanges count option requests, bids won, and bids lost. The good news is that we now have third parties coming in and implementing standards around ad verification, counting clicks, and conversions.

Once these standards are more established, the medium will continue to mature and gain the trust of advertisers.

PROGRAMMATIC

Transparency Trust is vital for the success of any advertising channel. In this respect, the combination of the mobile channel and programmatic technology warrants trust for both the seller and the buyer. Publishers receive greater access to selling methods that they can control, while buyers gain higher confidence that they will actually see their impressions.

Therefore, both receive something of value.

There is much more transparency on mobile than in the desktop arena, since mobile publishers and app developers defer channel conflict by eliminating the need for a separate sales force. Mobile publishers are often more open to monetising their inventory via programmatic buying because there are price floors that ensure their inventory will generate the highest return. This transparency is passed along to advertisers, which allows

for greater trust and greater investments in programmatic spending. AdExchanger reports that nearly one-third of agency employees plan on managing at least 64 per cent of clients’ digital budget programmatically on mobile in the next year.

While it is still early days for mobile programmatic, some success stories are emerging, with location and targeting often key ingredients for improved ROI. Mobile provides advertisers with many unique data points that are not available on desktop.

For advertisers, the ability to efficiently identify users on the go via their mobile devices, and target them based on their environment – whether they are at home, at work, or somewhere in between – ensures that advertisers are targeting the most relevant mobile user at the most cost-effective price.

MAKING SENSE

For Amobee, it is self evident that programmatic on mobile is here for the long haul, as it allows advertisers to extract more value from each media dollar invested.

As we shift into a mobile-first, multi-screen world, buying programmatically becomes a critical connector between consumers, their mobile devices and advertisers.

In short, mobile programmatic technology allows advertisers to reach potential customers on the right device, at the right time, in the right place, with the right content, at the right price, and that’s exactly what they want. MM To learn more, visit www.amobee.com

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THE NEXAGE EXCHANGE: WHERE BRANDS ACQUIRE PREMIUM AUDIENCE. Agencies and marketers are adapting to two overwhelming trends: the consumer shift to all-things mobile and the market shift to programmatic.

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PROGRAMMATIC

MAKING SENSE

THE PRACTICAL PROGRAMMATIC Programmatic is garnering a lot of attention – it’s forecast to account for more than 50 per cent of mobile spend by 2015 – but we still need to better understand what it is and what it does, says Nexage CMO, Victor Milligan Programmatic solves a critical problem.

Mobile advertising – and digital advertising – has reached a scale where human processes are too costly, inefďŹ cient and unworkable. Humans would drown in scale, and if we kept current processes in place, we would create an industry that simply can’t work.

This reality existed in other industries (e.g. ďŹ nance, credit cards, etc.). Those industries adopted high-volume transaction environments to enable efďŹ ciency at scale while enabling decisioning at the most granular level. Our version of this is programmatic – a high-volume transaction environment that enables intelligent, impression-level decisions.

Programmatic causes change – and change is hard. Programmatic is a new language, requires different skills, and alters processes.

We should think of this transition as a change management process, and adapting to change will take time. This is not a comment on programmatic (good or bad); it is a reality of an industry going through signiďŹ cant change.

Programmatic has many piece-parts.

Sometimes programmatic is positioned as a monolithic thing – it is not. It is has several key parts: s 4ECHNOLOGY 0ROGRAMMATIC USES HIGH volume transaction technology, including Real Time Bidding (RTB). s 4RANSACTIONS 0ROGRAMMATIC USES TWO transactions: buying transactions and auctions. Buying transactions support exclusive buyer-seller transactions (i.e., guaranteed, not competed) such as

programmatic direct. Auctions support competitive trades. s $ATA )MPRESSION LEVEL TRADING MEANS THAT exchanges (like ours), buyers, trading desks, and agencies can enrich a single impression with audience segments, including CRM data. The ability to enrich and target at the impression level is the ’nuclear power’ of programmatic. s -ARKETS 0ROGRAMMATIC HAS THREE core markets: programmatic direct, which automates the direct, one-to-one relationship between a publisher and buyer (e.g. agencies/ trading desks); private exchanges (typically ďŹ rst-look), where publishers offer high-value inventory to select buyers in an auction; and the open exchange, where multiple buyers and SELLERS TRANSACT IN AN AUCTION $ONE well, market participants have the exibility to operate all three markets in parallel and tear down/stand up new markets quickly and easily.

Support for ad formats Programmatic supports virtually all ad formats. Programmatic’s support for standard rich media and video is well-understood.

Support for native ad formats is less clear because the deďŹ nition of ‘native’ is fuzzy.

Some native formats that are unique to a publisher and advertiser may never be candidates for programmatic due to lack of scale, but most will. It’s helpful to separate the container of the ad from the ad’s context. The best examples of ‘native at scale’ are news feed ads. They mostly use the 300 x 250 container (which acts as a standard ad format) and yet

‘Programmatic is a new language, requires different skills, and alters processes’ Victor Milligan, CMO, Nexage are sufďŹ ciently customised to the publisher’s content to be deemed ‘native’. These are ideal candidates for programmatic.

In conclusion, programmatic is not simply a technology; it is a way of doing business. It is quickly becoming the core foundation for mobile and digital advertising. Programmatic mobile advertising is expected to grow faster than desktop since it piggy-backs on the learnings of desktop but eschews the legacy systems and mindset of desktop. Our job is to make it work, and work well. But we need to do so with less ‘jargon and hype’.

We need to strip it down to the basics and help people understand, engage with, and master programmatic. MM

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MAKING SENSE

JUNE 2014

RETAIL REVOLUTION Djamel Agaoua, CEO of MobPartner, looks at the exciting role beacons can play in the future of retailing Over the past two years, the worlds of physical and digital retail have collided in spectacular fashion. Not long ago, most retailers looked at their physical stores and their websites as two completely different, unrelated entities. People either bought online, or they went to shop in the high street store, and there was little or no interplay or crossover between the two. The smartphone has changed all that.

Today, retailers accept that the consumer in their store has a powerful computer in their pocket; one which will allow them to check the price of goods elsewhere and, if they wish, buy them in a couple of taps.

‘Showrooming’, as it has become known, is such a serious issue for retailers that on Black Friday in the US last year, one major consumer electronics retailer scrambled the 3G signal in its stores to stop shoppers engaging in the activity.

Insight So what can retailers do in the face of this technological threat to their business? One of the key weapons in their armoury is data

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Retailers would love to gather the same insight about the customers in their physical stores as they can get about their digital shoppers, such as: which products did they look at, and for how long? Did they buy the product(s)? Did they abandon the basket? If so, at what point? Is there an opportunity to retarget them and encourage them to buy the product(s) they almost bought before abandoning the basket? In the quest to gather this data, retailers are starting to turn to beacon technology.

There’s a lot of confusion around beacons, and how retailers might use them to engage with customers. Simply put, beacons are transmitters. On their own, they cannot track or measure shopper activity online or in-store.

A common misconception is that retailers will deploy beacon technology to know when, for example, a customer is near the fish counter and ping them with a special offer on fish. Two minutes later when they are near the meat counter, the retailer will ping them another special offer on meat. It’s not hard to imagine how annoying and intrusive this type of beacon deployment might quickly become. So there is a lot of work to do educating retailers on how best to use beacon technology.

The ability to track and measure will certainly play a large part in being able to drive better omni-channel strategies. As for how beacons will be deployed, we see a number of

‘There’s a lot of confusion around beacons, and how retailers might use them to engage with customers’ Djamel Agaoua, CEO, MobPartner use cases, some of which are possible today.

The first use case, which we are working on with several retailers right now, is to use beacons to drive footfall.

Driving app downloads The first step is to drive downloads of the retailer’s app. For MobPartner, this is the easy part. It’s what we have been doing for the past

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MAKING SENSE

A beacon placed at the entrance to a store can identify when consumers using the retailer’s app are nearby, and serve them with an ad to encourage them into the store

five years. Through our publisher network, we drive around 3m app downloads every month.

Once the retailer’s app is on the consumer’s phone, a beacon placed at the entrance to the store can identify when those consumers are nearby, and serve them with an ad to encourage them into the store.

The ad will be presented within another app the consumer is using, bought in real-time through a real-time bidding network. Because that shopper is more valuable to the retailer by virtue of their proximity to the store, we would bid more for that shopper at that particular time than we would without the location context.

Incidentally, we would always recommend targeting the user by in-app advertising, rather than a

push notification in the retailer’s app as these are highly intrusive and create a poor impression with the consumer.

Beacons can also help to identify consumers who have previously visited the store but who did not bother to redeem a coupon or promotion delivered via the retailer’s app. The beacon can then be used to retarget them via in-app advertising in other apps they use.

Looking further ahead, the possibilities become even more enticing and exciting. In the near future, retailers will be able to use beacon technology to measure the amount of time a shopper spends in each part of the store.

Used in combination with other solutions, such as RFID tags and digital paper, beacons will also enable the retailer to see what

products a consumer looked at and picked up, in order to retarget them with advertising messages for products they have considered, but not yet bought.

Retail revolution We are at the beginning of a revolution in retail. It’s one that has been fuelled by changing consumer behaviour, driven principally by mobile technology.

It’s a nice irony then, that mobile technology, in the form of beacons, will also have a major part to play in helping retailers combat the threat they face from ‘showrooming’. Mobile may seem like a serious problem for the retail industry; but it’s actually a big part of the solution. MM

Mobile Performance Marketing

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Keywords Business Teamwork

Business Success Cannes

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Creativity

Office 15 - 21 June

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By: Max Oppenheim Models: Ted Royer, Chief Creative Officer, Droga5, New York; Angel Anderson, VP, Experience Director, Crispin Porter+Bogusky Los Angeles; Sean Sim, ECD, Ogilvy China www.canneslions.com

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SHINING LIGHT TagPoints co-founder Jess Stephens takes a closer look at how beacon technology can give bricks-and-mortar businesses a boost points around a location, which activate a notification for the user when they walk past.

There is no need for an internet connection or a power source as the battery in a beacon will last for several years. While beacons have a range of up to 70 metres, they can also be accurate to within inches, which means that they can deliver micro-location-based messages to consumers.

Where are they used?

‘Using beacons, a business can tag a physical store in the same way that they would tag the categories on their website’ Jess Stephens, director and co-founder, TagPoints Beacon technology is a new innovation that is being rapidly adopted by retailers and businesses with a bricks-and-mortar presence.

Beacons are basically lowenergy Bluetooth transmitters – sometimes known as iBeacons – that allow you to send realtime messages to customers’ smartphones when they are on the shop floor. Unlike NFC, they will work with iOS, as well as Android and Windows devices.

These small wireless units have a large range and can be placed anywhere in store to tag

TagPoints is a proximity marketing platform that allows businesses to control the content broadcast by their in-store beacons and ensures that shoppers aren’t bombarded with too many triggered messages when they enter the store.

A TagPoints-enabled app will recognise customers as they walk through the door, ‘wake up’ the app and then deep-link to relevant content for that consumer at that time. It could be a customer-service message, such as: “Your click and collect order is at the back of the store”, a welcome message, or a targeted promotion.

In the UK, Meadowhall Shopping Centre in Sheffield is using beacons to ring-fence hotspots around the complex. When entering a hotspot, shoppers receive an alert on their smartphone. When they tap on the notification it will activate the hotspot offer, ready for redemption at the participating retailer store. Retailers currently participating in the beacon campaign include Krispy Kreme, Hotel Chocolat, Cath Kidston and House of Fraser.

thoroughly joined-up communications, receiving rewards and recommendations based on their history and profile.

The second benefit is the resulting data from a mobile-proximity solution. Using beacons, a business can tag a physical store in the same way that they would tag the categories on their website. Ultimately, this delivers the same level of accountability as measuring user journeys online.

We believe that beacons have a big role to play in the future of retail and we are working hard to make it easier for brands to tap into their full potential. MM

Why use beacons?

There are two main benefits to deploying beacons in-store. The first is that you can tie up online browsing with the in-store experience. Customers will benefit from

Beacons can deliver targeted customer-engagement solutions that have a genuine commercial benefit

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BUSINESS MODELS

JUNE 2014

THE CLICK TRICK Patrick Pettay, VP and head of global sales at IQzone, tells David Murphy how the company’s ad technology is designed to dramatically increase CTRs while improving the user experience The mobile advertising world is in a constant state of flux. Everyone’s chasing the silver bullet, the secret sauce that will encourage mobile users to click on ads. The problem, in most cases, is that there is simply not a good enough reason to do so. Small banners presented on an already-small screen do little to engage the average consumer. If they are presented at a time when the user is not ready to engage with the ad, the chances of a click are minimal at best.

So what makes for a successful mobile ad campaign? According to Patrick Pettay, VP and head of global sales at IQzone, there are four key elements to a successful ad campaign on mobile: good creative; the right format; good timing; and testing.

“Mobile is not just online on a smaller screen; it’s different, so you need an alternative strategy, but I’m not sure a lot of mobile advertisers have worked that out yet,” says Pettay. “Advertisers have to develop ads that are mobilespecific, and take account of the context in which the user will see the ad, including the time of day, their location, and what sort of app they are using when the ad is served.”

Good creative, says Pettay, is about a compelling and

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an engaging way. When it comes to formats, he says advertisers have to make the most of the small real estate they are working with. So full-screen interstitials work much better than a banner occupying only a small proportion of the screen. Timing is all about presenting the ad at a time when the user is more likely to interact with it, not when they are halfway through reading an article, checking the weather, or playing a game on their phone.

Testing is about real-time evaluation of all aspects of a campaign, from the creative, to the apps it appears in, in order to optimise what’s working well and call a halt to anything that’s not performing.

Premium publishers

‘Advertisers have to take account of the context in which the user sees the ad, and what sort of app they are using when the ad is served’

IQzone’s proprietary ad unit, known as Postitial, appears in apps from a broad spectrum of premium publishers, such as Outfit7 and Zeptolab, which are optimising for user experience. It’s an ad placement that can house a wide variety of ad treatments and formats, including full-screen interstitials, native, rich media and ‘brought to you by’ sponsorship ads.

So it ticks the creative and format boxes.

What about timing? This is where Pettay believes Postitial’s real strength lies. Take an ad within a gaming app as an example. Typically, Pettay notes, this will be served when the player reaches the end of a level.

“It’s perceived as a natural break in the game,” he says. “But in actual fact, there’s nothing natural about it at all. If a publisher serves an ad between two levels of a game,

Patrick Pettay, VP and head of global sales, IQzone or halfway through an article, and the user clicks on the ad, they are going to be taken away from the content they were enjoying to wherever the ad takes them. That’s got to have a negative impact on the app user experience.”

IQzone’s approach with Postitial is not to serve ads between levels of a game, or when immersed in content, but to serve them when the user ends their app session. IQzone’s

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patent-pending technology detects this opportunity and immediately displays a fullscreen advertisement.

“When someone ends their app session, that’s them sending a signal to Postitial publishers that now is a great time to serve them an ad,” says Pettay. “The timing of the ad serving respects the user flow, rather than getting in the way of it. This is the value we add, and it’s something no one else can offer.”

He puts it another way. “Say you’re talking to a friend and I tap you on the shoulder to try to show you something. Chances are you’re going to be annoyed and ignore me, and the more times I tap you on the shoulder, the more annoyed you’re going to get. On the other hand, if I politely, respectfully wait for you to finish the conversation you’re having, you’re much more likely to thank me for it, and engage with me afterwards. This is exactly how Postitial works.”

Golden opportunities The concept sounds good in theory, but you could be forgiven for thinking that it offers a somewhat limited number of opportunities given the only time a user will see a Postitial ad is when they end an app session. However, according to the 2013 Internet Trends report

by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers internet guru Mary Meeker, the typical mobile user interacts with their device around 150 times per day. This means that every time they stop playing a game to check their email, then stop checking email to see what the weather forecast says, there’s an opportunity to serve an ad.

One early adopter of the technology is Outfit7, publisher of the Talking Tom (et al) app series. Earlier this year, the company deployed Postitial interstitial ad units, and they saw a 100 per cent increase in clickthrough rates (CTR) compared with existing in-app interstitials.

“What I found exciting about IQzone’s Postitial product was that it reused common full-screen ad formats,” says Outfit7’s director of advertising operations, Dilpesh Parmar.

“This meant that existing campaigns from ad networks and DSPs could be used right away, coupled with the introduction of a new ad placement, which meant incremental revenue for Outfit7…The upsurge in ad engagement equated to a considerable increase for our eCPMs and overall ad revenue.”

This, says Pettay, is another of Postitial’s many virtues. “It’s a premium placement,” he says. “The timing is right and the consumer

BUSINESS MODELS

is in the right frame of mind and open to new ideas. This allows publishers to directly sell this to advertisers, including the option of putting a sponsorship wrapper around it.

“These characteristics add value for the advertiser and generate a very high eCPM relative to other ad placements for the publisher. In fact, Postitial performs five times better than traditional ad placements, making it a significant component of overall publisher ad revenue.”

There are doubtless many publishers in Outfit7’s position, looking to leverage the increasing amount of time consumers spend on their mobile devices, and grow their mobile advertising revenues, without compromising the user experience. In short, they’re looking to answer the question: ‘How can I make people click on ads?’ It’s a balancing act that few publishers have thus far managed to master.

Postitial’s unique selling point is that it increases the value of each ad engagement by improving the advertising experience, due to the context in which the ad is served.

One could say that using Postitial as a way of generating incremental revenue is a golden opportunity for both publishers and advertisers alike. MM Timing is everything. The approach IQzone takes with Postitial is not to serve ads when the user is immersed in content, but when they end their app session

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BUSINESS MODELS

JUNE 2014

FIXING MOBILE

ADVERTISING Christian Louca, CEO of Tamome, calls on brands to start taking mobile seriously and put it at the heart of their business It’s easy to think of mobile as a new medium, but for those of us who have been working in it and with it since the beginning, it’s actually almost 15 years old. Which is why it frustrates me sometimes that many brands and agencies still don’t seem to get it. Recently, I’ve been thinking about why this is, and how we can fix it.

The reasons are many and varied; here are some that seem to be recurring. First is the cultural mindset in many companies, Fixed Web first or Mobile first? Which one are you?

A lot of brands are still living in the dotcom era, working to fixed web rules and mindsets. These are not well suited to mobile and consumers are taking a desired path instead.

Often, this means that they are in a world of bad experiences and frustration. With this in mind how confident are you that they will stay your customer? These companies also have legacy systems that are inappropriate for the age of the connected, always-on consumer. Their back-end systems, more often than not, are not designed to deal with the complexities around the multitude of platforms and devices that consumers use day to day; absorbing information,

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registering an interest or buying products.

Only recently, a friend of mine, who ironically is a pilot for British Airways, tried to confirm his holiday booking via mobile… failed, then tried tablet…failed, and in the end gave up. This should not be happening today. These systems need updating to take advantage of the opportunities that mobile and tablet offer, especially so, when you consider the frightening pace at which technology is advancing. Five years ago, the iPad didn’t exist, and as I write this, the iPhone – the world’s first smartphone – is still just short of seven years old.

Lack of knowledge There’s a lack of knowledge about mobile, about how the connected world works, how the connected consumer behaves and the context of their journey. Years ago, I remember when explaining to people that I worked for a mobile company their immediate reaction was they thought I was selling mobile phones!

Today, it’s very different; everyone wants to add ‘mobilism’ to their CV. I see a lot of LinkedIn profiles of people claiming to be a mobile expert, with three years’ experience. To my mind, that degree of experience does not make you an expert in anything.

It is not easy to find the right skill set and bring expert knowledge in-house, which is one reason why we see a lot of acquisitions occur in this space. Talent buying mixed with a bit of technology. For those that cannot afford to make acquisitions or for whom it is simply not part of their game plan they often lack internal accountability. Who wants to be accountable for the unknown? This further

fuels the divide between those that ’get it’ and those that don’t.

Behind the curve What makes this so dangerous is the recognition and acceptance within companies that are not geared up to ‘do’ mobile that they should be doing it. So what happens, in our experience, is that they do it badly, therefore it doesn’t work, so then they write it off as a bad investment and fall further behind the curve, retreating to what they know best - print, TV and online.

We also see a lack of understanding around collecting data, and analysing it at both a macro and a micro level, in order to optimise mobile ad campaigns. At a macro level, you need to understand the broad trends, the types of people who like your product, so you can go after them. But at a micro level, you need to understand what’s happening now, because it may well buck the trend, and if you don’t optimise your campaign in line with what’s happening right now, it will under-perform.

To explain what I mean by this, we optimise and enhance a campaign for a major UK telco sometimes between 30 to 40 times a day, by analysing the first-party data at a micro level daily, and at a macro level, weekly. If we didn’t do that, we would not deliver the level of performance we do.

Relying purely on third-party data is not enough. Not analysing, not optimising, is not

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‘There’s a lack of knowledge about mobile, about how the connected world works, how the connected consumer behaves and the context of their journey’ Christian Louca, CEO, Tamome an option for us, but it seems to be for many other organisations. Companies need and should want to collect their own data on their customers and prospects.

You have to understand the complexity and dynamics of it, because if you don’t, you cannot run effective mobile advertising. You cannot build a Formula 1 racing car without building a prototype, running some track trials, testing the performance, monitoring the data, analysing the data and ultimately making changes to the engine to drive better performance and deliver a reliable finished product. Mobile advertising is no different.

Then there’s the omnichannel problem.

There are so many communication channels and consumer touchpoints open to brands, including print, TV, radio, outdoor, cinema, email mobile and online. Too often, each of these channels is siloed. There is, arguably,

more cohesion between the more traditional channels, but mobile especially is often treated as a bolt-on, disconnected from everything else. I thought we had got beyond this, but over the last few years for some reason, we seem to have gone backwards.

It all comes back to planning, and the fact that mobile is not planned in to the mix early enough.

When it comes to the ads themselves, we see some poor creative executions, principally because agencies who don’t do mobile are being asked to come up with creative treatments for mobile. But there’s more to it than taking a banner that runs online and shrinking it down to fit on a mobile screen.

And going back to my earlier point about optimisation, in the mobile space, you need to turn the creative round fast if you’re looking to change something that’s not working.

Programmatic buying Like a lot of other people right now, I’m excited about the potential for programmatic technologies and real-time bidding, which have the potential to automate a lot of what happens in the mobile advertising space, removing a lot of the complexity, the endless meetings and spreadsheets.

But actually, even though we are investing heavily in programmatic, I would argue that

BUSINESS MODELS

the market is not ready for realtime bidding yet. Not until we get the basics right around strategy and planning. Understanding how to make mobile work effectively is key. If you automate the trading of mobile advertising inventory, but then the ads push people to poorly-rendered landing pages or sites with complex user flows designed on legacy systems for the Fixed Web user, with context out of mind and the desired path ignored, it could just put the industry in reverse gear.

I believe there’s a bright future for mobile advertising and marketing, and that mobile can play an important role in helping brands attract new customers and retain existing ones. But it will only fulfil its promise for those brands that go beyond paying lip service to mobile and who put it at the heart of their business.

Organisations like Amazon and John Lewis or brands like Rovio’s Angry Birds. Otherwise, if you’re not going to do it right, why bother doing it at all?” MM

Some organisations like John Lewis have got their mobile advertising and marketing mix just right.

More brands should be following their lead

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AT HOME AT WORK AT PLAY On THE street

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LIFE2014

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BUSINESS MODELS

CONNECTING THE DOTS

David Murphy talks to Sharon Hartigan, client operations director at Fuerte, about building stronger relationships Fuerte – the name is Spanish for ‘strong’ – started out three years ago in London with a focus on app development. Since then, off the back of great work for the likes of Audi, Unilever and Visa, it has grown steadily, and opened a second office in Prague, with a US office opening in New York this summer.

Over the past three years the company’s approach and philosophy has matured, as client operations director Sharon Hartigan explains.

“Three years ago there was a feeling that mobile meant apps and for many brands that was their first experience of mobile marketing,” she says, “but things have moved on. Mobile should now be part of a connected digital strategy, central to every brand’s vision, and our approach supports that.”

It’s reflected in the way Fuerte now works with clients. It has moved from a brief- or project-led approach to more of a strategic partnership. “I believe it benefits clients if there is a stronger relationship underpinning the work you do for them, says Hartigan.

“It allows you to get under the skin, to understand what makes the company, and more importantly, their customers, tick.”

Collaborative approach This stronger relationship makes for a much more collaborative approach. Fuerte works with its clients on ideation, “developing concepts to create things they maybe didn’t

realise they needed until we created them,” as Hartigan describes it.

Digital disruption is another specialism.

“This is where we look at what a client has already done and already got and think about how we can make it work harder for them,” says Hartigan.

For Carphone Warehouse, Fuerte has enhanced the user experience and userinterface design across its omni-channel retailing platform. Working on multiple products such as honeyBee Activate and PinPoint, the goal was to build customer and staff engagement by enabling authoritative and collaborative assisted sales conversations.

Getting the right behaviour during customer interactions is critically important and the team’s UI work has helped make a positive difference for multiple clients.

“Fuerte have been thoughtful, creative and flexible, working cheerfully and professionally as part of an integrated team under enormous pressure,” says Steve Moore of Carphone Warehouse.

The final one is We Make Mobile. This is the idea of tapping into whatever is the most relevant mobile tech out there, whether it’s Augmented Reality (AR) or location-targeting to create customer-enriching experiences.

An AR app for Audi, for example, lets the consumer experience what it’s like to be inside the car from their phone or tablet.

Hartigan is pleased with the progress the company is making, and believes Fuerte’s clients are equally enthused by the possibilities mobile offers.

“We want to make mobile a natural part of every strategy a company puts together to keep their customers engaged,” she says. “This is an industry that never stands still; it’s a privilege to help great brands make sense of it and profit from it.” MM

Key tenets

More information: www.fuerteint.com

The Fuerte approach is formalised into three key tenets. The first is Connected Journeys. This is the idea that a brand’s customer should enjoy a seamless relationship with the brand across all touchpoints, both physical and digital The second is Enhancing Experiences, the idea that there’s more to mobile than building an app, that what brands should look to create is an overall connected digital Fuerte helped Carphone Warehouse enhance the user experience experience for their customers.

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THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

JUNE 2014

OFFDECK In her sign-off column, Helen Keegan muses on mobile advertising, app discoverability, and the power of SMS And so after four years, I’ve reached the end of my journey writing this column for Mobile Marketing g, and the first thing I’d like to say is what a blast it’s been.

It’s funny how much has changed over those four years, but also, how some things have stayed the same. In my very first column, I urged brands not to ignore the power of SMS. Used as a CRM tool, I argued, to thank customers for their order, or tell them when it would be delivered, it had a lot to offer, though many brands refused to believe it. Four years on, nothing has changed.

SMS remains a powerful CRM tool, and one that, for some reason, is still ignored by the majority of brands. Ho hum.

In June 2011, I returned from a trip to the US fired up by their enthusiasm for mobile, but slightly frustrated that all the money men seemed interested in investing in was apps. Nothing else mobile was on their radar.

Three years later, I think this has changed, though not as much as I would have liked.

Two issues later, I lamented the fact that too many brands ignore BlackBerry and Nokia when developing apps. Now I know it’s easy to poke fun at both companies given their recent travails, but the fact is, there are still an awful lot of BlackBerry and Nokia devices out

‘I would very much like someone to do something to improve app discoverability. It’s still a problem’

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there, so perhaps ignoring them is not such a good idea. OK, so you may feel that in terms of native apps, iOS and Android are as far as you need to go, but for all the other platforms out there, you should have a mobile web presence as a safety net.

Indeed, given the emergence of responsive design, there’s really no excuse for not doing so, and I am delighted that responsive has enabled many brands who did not previously have a mobile site to now offer their customers and prospects a more engaging online experience on their mobile phones. I wonder when Apple will get round to it…

Mobile advertising On that point, in September 2012, I called on the mobile advertising industry to reinvent itself, arguing that there was too little innovation in the space, but giving a shoutout to two companies I did think were trying to push the envelope – Qriously and Kiip. I’m pleased to say that both companies seem to be gaining traction.

More recently, I’ve been impressed

by ResponsiveAds, who have seen the emergence of responsive websites, and come up with ad units that behave in the same way. As an advertiser, you produce one creative, and the font scales in proportion to the size of the screen it’s being viewed on. It makes the planning and buying process a whole lot easier and from a consumer standpoint, delivers a much less intrusive experience. I also

really like what Future Ad Labs are doing with their attempt to reinvent the Captcha experience.

Captcha boxes are a necessary evil, used by some websites to confirm that it’s a human trying to get in, and not a bot. But as we all know, they are far from perfect.

Because the letters have to be slightly scrambled it’s sometimes impossible to read the characters you are supposed to enter.

Future Ad Labs’ take on this is to replace the Captcha box with a branded game that makes you use your mouse. So if it’s Heinz, you might have to squeeze the ketchup out of a bottle. The mouse activity ticks the box of proving you’re human, but it’s a vastly improved experience, and the brand gets exclusive exposure.

App discoverability In signing off, I would once again urge brands not to ignore the power of SMS. And picking up on something I mentioned in my column back in July 2010, I would very much like someone to do something to improve app discoverability. It was a problem four years ago, and it’s still a problem today.

A much bigger one, in fact, given how many more apps there are now than there were then. I still don’t get why the app stores don’t tell me what apps my friends like or, when I download an app, the other apps that people who also have this one tend to download. Now there’s a challenge.

Who’s up for it? MM

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