Mobile Marketing Issue 20, June 2015 by Mobile Marketing Magazine

JUNE 2015

CONTENTS

IN THIS ISSUE : 5

brand STRATEGY Schuh reveals all

6 Hello and welcome to the latest print edition of Mobile Marketing, which many of you will be reading from the sun-kissed beaches – or conference halls at least – of Cannes. This year’s event will be home to the usual plethora of media and advertising types, and no doubt a disproportionate amount of Apple Watches. The Watch has certainly been the major mobile launch of the past couple of months, and early feedback suggests that Apple has another hit on its hands. In this issue, we asked Alex Spencer to take six of the most popular smartphone apps and put the Watch version of them to the test. Read how he got on starting on p14. Meanwhile on p50, Chris Minas, co-founder of Nimbletank, gives us his first impressions of developing for Apple’s latest device – and they’re not all good. There is more to wearables, however, than the Apple Watch. As Alex Spencer reveals in his piece starting on p.22, wearables in the enterprise are big business, allowing workers to keep both hands free to perform their various tasks, while still being able to access information via a heads-up display. Alex has also spent the last few weeks dining out on expenses, but only so that he could put some mobile payment apps through their paces. See who came out on top on p.28. Elsewhere, Tim Maytom has taken a deep dive into cross-channel attribution in order to help you make sense of the ongoing battle to track and understand consumer behaviour as they move from one screen to another. Read his primer on p8. We also have Schuh’s Sean McKee explaining the shoe retailer’s approach to mobile (p.5) and in our Cover Story on p.18, we hear from BlisMedia about their attempts to reinvent location data for the programmatic age. Enjoy the issue, and if you’re out in Cannes, enjoy the sun and the show.

NEWS REVIEW

8 14 WATCHING BRIEF Apple Watch apps on test

Cross-device attribution 101 Making sense of the multi-screen world

Exploring BlisMedia’s location tech

AWARDS TIME The 2015 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are open for business

WORK IN PROGRESS

Wearables in the enterprise

17 WATCH THIS SPACE

THE WAR FOR TALENT

Should your brand be on the Apple Watch?

STREAM ON Periscope and Meerkat livestreaming apps compared

Finding tomorrow’s mobile marketing leaders

28 FOOD FOR THOUGHT

MUSIC TO A BRAND’S EARS

Bagz.it’s smart audio tech explained

MOBILE VIDEO CHALLENGE Teads’ Todd Tran looks at the potential for video on mobile

CASE STUDY How Netbiscuits helped a football site save thousands

We put four restaurant mobile payment apps through their paces 49 INSTANT

GRATIFICATION

What do Facebook’s Instant Articles mean for the publishing industry?

50 CONFESSIONS

OF...

…an Apple Watch developer

David Murphy, editorial director

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Editorial director: David Murphy – david.murphy@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)7976 927 062 Managing director: John Owen – john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)7769 674 824 Commerial director: Lyndon Baptiste – lyndon.baptiste@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)7958 928094 Business development manager: Richard Partridge – richard.partridge@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Designer: Alistair Gillan – aQ2 Ltd Online editor: Alex Spencer – alex.spencer@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Reporter: Tim Maytom – tim.maytom@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Marketing & operations manager : Hannah Wallace – hannah.wallace@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Contributors: Steve Ricketts, Chris Minas 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

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JUNE 2015

COMMENT

brand STRATEGY BY SEAN MCKEE, HEAD OF ECOMMERCE AND CUSTOMER SERVICES, SCHUH hey say a week is a long time in politics, and I think it’s fair to say the same is true of retail today. Mobile, and consumer behaviour, have radically and permanently altered the picture, and at pace. It’s not that long ago that we were hearing about the biggest sale that M&S had done on mobile and talking about m. sites that would point you to the ‘main site’. Today, I would argue that the mobile presentation of your site is now the ‘main’ one, if such a thing exists. Retailers are playing catch-up. Mobile is digital retailing. And all the growth we see is on mobile. 2011 was a key year for schuh.co.uk. A false start in 2008, just too early, had burned fingers. As part of our second, more cautious attempt at going mobile, we released an iOS app and an optimised m. site in the same year. By then, traffic shifts were clearer and the need to find a way to embrace the shift was a clear imperative. While “doing an app” was sexy, success for us was always going to be counted in sufficient sales volumes and judged on those terms, the site won hands down. It was clear, and has remained clear since, that mass market success was best delivered by going where the customers are – a decent site experience located through search. Not

that the development of the app was a waste – we still had the sales, even if they were 12 times lower, but more crucially, we had the insight. Those app/site comparisons have been useful every day since, even as mobile has fairly radically changed in the interim – though it has to be said, they couldn’t help us with what in 2012 became the tablet site. The enormous early success of iPad, the success of our m. site, and the (then) separation of Google Adwords campaigns

and eventually, a different mindset. We’re there, now, I think – and certainly our UK responsive site (schuh. co.uk, launched in September 2014) has absolutely been conceived mobile-first. It’s the logical returning point for web traffic, about half of which now comes from smartphones. It’s also respectful of a consumer who, we’ve come to understand, shops agnostically across devices, and who needs a serious effort from the retailer to deliver consistency. We’re working at it.

“SUCCESS WAS BEST DELIVERED BY GOING WHERE THE CUSTOMERS ARE - A DECENT SITE EXPERIENCE LOCATED THROUGH SEARCH” by device, reinforced a view that said that optimising for tablet was the next sensible move. And it was, until Google shut down the campaign separation and getting traffic to the right site became an issue. The tablet site slowly withered and was shut down in 2013. Of course, all the while, ‘mobile’ was redefining its purpose – less a device, more of a (smartphone) mission – short, commodity-seeking visits, local and on-the-go behaviours, a more evident discount orientation, fingers reconditioned to tap, swipe, pinch. And all the while, we were learning too – new onsite behaviours like heavier searches for store stock, reduced conversion rates, changes in basket size. Customers speaking a new language, faster, in confined spaces. A new language requiring a different approach to UX, different competencies such as HTML5,

So where next? Well, it’s still very much about websites for us. We’re focused on consuming the best advertising for smartphone searchers and seeing a real march towards the visual rather than textual format. On-site, and in a similar vein, we are introducing new social, usergenerated content and working to better measure the role of video. The rise of bigger phone screens is certainly helpful – our aim has to be restoring conversion rates to historic desktop levels over time, but in the interim, the central challenges of mobile remain – the need for more traffic to achieve the same sales as desktop; the requirement to deliver fast download speeds, better performance and excellent UX; and a customer who is always a few steps ahead of the retailer – and still moving. The Apple Watch might even be on enough wrists by this time next year to take a serious look again at that app… MM

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NEWS REVIEW

JUNE 2015

NEWS

REVIEW Alex Spencer casts an eye over some of the biggest stories in the mobile space since our last issue

Facebook makes moves into publishing and search

Google unleashes ‘Mobilegeddon’

mong the raft of announcements Facebook made at its F8 developer conference in March, one in particular stood out: the launch of a video player that can be embedded on third-party sites. This player potentially brings Facebook into direct competition with Google’s YouTube – as does the company’s move into search. An ‘Add a link’ button has appeared in Facebook’s iOS app for some users in the US, enabling them to find web content without leaving the social network, or having to use an external search engine. Google isn’t the only business Facebook has its eye on – it also seems

to want a slice of the online publishing market. Its Instant Articles offering, which launched on 12 May, brings content from publishers including Buzzfeed and the BBC directly into Facebook’s iOS app, meaning users don’t have to click out to a website to read articles. Facebook seems to have addressed early concerns about this taking business away from traditional news sites by enabling publishers to sell the ad space in these Facebook-hosted articles themselves, keeping 100 per cent of the revenue, and to track the user data of readers – but as the company continues to diversify far beyond a social network, it seems likely to step on a few toes.

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Google’s long-awaited change to its search algorithm came into effect on 21 April. Dubbed ‘Mobilegeddon’, the change gave mobile-friendly sites a boost in Google’s search rankings on smartphones. Microsoft’s Bing followed suit a few weeks later. The change is intended to provide a better search experience for mobile users, but as the ‘Mobilegeddon’ name suggests, it managed to attract controversy – particularly about how it would affect small businesses that can’t afford a mobile site. It wasn’t just these smaller companies which were unprepared for the change, though: according to research from Somo, RyanAir, Next and the Daily Mail were among the big-name brands that didn’t score full marks from Google’s mobilefriendly testing tool. A few weeks on, however, and it’s clear that this wasn’t the end of the world for non-optimised sites. After all, mobilefriendliness is just one of over 200 signals taken into consideration for Google’s rankings – so it’s not too surprising that web traffic hasn’t been damaged as much as that ominous moniker suggests.

JUNE 2015

NEWS REVIEW

Amazon launches Dash button When it was announced on April Fool’s Day, we briefly thought Amazon’s latest launch was a hoax. The Dash – a small wifi-enabled plastic tag that can be placed in the home to instantly order products at the literal push of a button – sounded exactly like the kind of joke that tech companies post every 1 April. Dash is very much a real product, however, and if successful it could establish the eCommerce potential of the Internet of Things. Once synced up with the Amazon mobile app, the Dash button is tied to a specific product which can be re-ordered with a single press. This idea is especially useful for small household purchases – the kind of items that frequently run out, like kitchen roll or detergent – so Amazon has partnered with brands such as Kraft, Tide and Huggies to offer branded versions of the buttons. It’s no joke then, but it remains to be seen whether the Dash concept takes off.

Vodafone and EE leave Weve joint venture The UK’s MNO market is currently undergoing some major changes. So far this year, we’ve seen Hutchison Whampoa, owner of Three, acquiring O2, and BT buying EE, itself formed through a merger between Orange and T-Mobile. So it’s perhaps no surprise that Weve, the joint venture between the country’s three biggest operators, is coming to an end, at least in its current form. EE and Vodafone have bowed out of the joint venture, with O2 buying up their stakes to take up the reins itself at Weve. Considering that O2 Media, the

operator’s mobile marketing arm, was closed down when Weve opened, in order to move employees across, it appears that the business is back at square one. Since it opened its doors in 2012, Weve has experienced mixed success. For 2013, its first full year of operations, the business reported losses of £25m, against £13m in revenues. It finally launched its display advertising service last July, but just two months later announced it was abandoning the mobile wallet project that seemed to be the original focus of the joint venture.

Verizon acquires AOL for $4.4bn The name might be associated more with the early days of the 56k internet than the modern tech world, but in May, AOL proved it was still worth a cool $4.4bn (£2.8bn) in a deal that saw it picked up by US operator Verizon. The focus of the deal wasn’t on AOL’s internet subscription business, but rather, its portfolio of publishers like Techcrunch and the Huffington Post, and its mobile video advertising platform. While the ISP business still relies on dial-up technology – serving a remarkable 2.3m subscribers in the US – AOL’s ad offering has done a much better job of moving with the times. The company acquired video platform Adapt.TV in 2013 and marketing analytics firm Convertro in 2014. Today, while it’s not quite on the scale of Google or Facebook, AOL’s ad platform holds a 2.1 per cent share of the US digital advertising market, or 0.74 per cent globally – and it seems to be this which Verizon is most interested in.

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

Cross-device attribution

As mobile takes an increasing slice of the ad-spend pie, the question of how to credit each digital and non-digital channel for its part in the sale becomes increasingly important. Tim Maytom explains where the industry stands right now, and what the future of cross-device attribution looks like

www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

JUNE 2015

et’s call it the Cookie Problem. With the advent of digital advertising, marketers could suddenly track users around the internet, retargeting them with ads for products they had viewed but not bought, identifying them based on browsing habits and accessing a wealth of information that simply wasn’t available to them before. Now, mobile offers the same sort of tracking, using device identifiers and similar methods, but the question has become how to join up these two ecosystems. This year, mobile will surpass desktop and laptop PCs in terms of the amount of time spent online by UK adults, having grown almost 500 per cent in the past four years. With such a profound shift towards mobile, marketers are asking how they can unify their efforts across the two increasingly equal channels, and also how to bring offline channels – TV, outdoor, print – into the mix. “Existing marketers’ digital footprints and consumer marketing strategies need to adjust to a cross-device, people-centric world, where true user level reach and frequency can be controlled across devices, and valuable marketer data can be used to inform messaging, not just in terms of content, but context,” says Gareth Davies, CEO of data intelligence company Adbrain. The problem of cross-device attribution – being able to identify a user across desktop, mobile and offline activity – has become one of the major debates in mobile marketing, and is often held up as one

of the primary obstacles in getting more advertisers and brands to embrace mobile as an advertising channel. In a survey by Nielsen, 30 per cent of brands said the ability to use the same metrics to evaluate reach on mobile that they use for offline would increase their use of the channel, while 55 per cent of advertisers remain “doubtful or unconvinced of publishers’ targeting claims and about mobile advertising’s effectiveness”. “It’s one of the most critical challenges faced by the industry,” says Chuck Moxley, chief marketing officer at mobile ad platform 4INFO. “Consumers are moving across screens constantly, but advertisers are playing catch up. Right now, big brands don’t feel confident in the available solutions, and it’s holding them back. Mobile is the Wild West, with no standard currently for tying a mobile device to a household.”

A tale of two solutions The answer to the problem of cross-channel attribution currently breaks down into two different camps: deterministic and probabilistic. They are the kind of terms that can sound very intimidating to someone coming to this area for the first time, but in truth, the difference between the two is relatively straightforward. Deterministic methods rely on logins that transcend mobile and desktop, primarily Facebook and Google, though others such as Yahoo and eBay make claims

ANALYSIS

“VALUABLE MARKETER DATA CAN BE USED TO INFORM MESSAGING, NOT JUST IN TERMS OF CONTENT, BUT CONTEXT” GARETH DAVIES, ADBRAIN

The second-screening phenomenon presents opportunities, but also challenges, for advertisers

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

for being included in this select group. The data that social networks gather on their users is channel agnostic – it doesn’t matter if you’re liking a post on desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile, the data all goes to the same place, and helps construct the same profile. The power of deterministic platforms such as Facebook to link together digital and mobile advertising is the reason we have seen the growth of social logins across various other sites. If a brand can connect its app to your Facebook profile, it opens up a whole wealth of information it can use to target you with more relevant messaging. Facebook is by far the most popular platform for social logins, representing 45 per cent of all social login use, according to a report by identity management firm Janrain, while Google takes second place with 37 per cent. There’s a considerable drop to the next most represented social network, with Twitter used just five per cent of the time, while Yahoo, LinkedIn, Microsoft and various others scramble over the remainder.

No privacy in the walled garden In many ways, deterministic is the easy solution for marketers looking for a crosschannel solution, particularly as Facebook

and Google partner with big data firms like DataLogix and Axciom in an effort to not only bridge digital and mobile activity, but offline too, adding another layer of insight. But the deterministic method has big problems – most publishers don’t have the cash or scale to build consumer platforms the size of Facebook or Google. “For most publishers, you are limited to a ‘walled garden’, restricted to their registered user database and owned and operated properties, which limits the total audience you can reach,” says 4INFO’s Moxley. “Furthermore, most have only an e-mail address from their registered users, and the match rate from e-mail to home address can be as low as 10 per cent, further limiting the size of the audience you can match to past-purchase or CRM data both for targeting or measurement.” The relative monopoly that Facebook and Google hold on social login means that to make effective use of deterministic targeting on a wide scale, you need to partner with one or preferably both to get access to their data, adding an SDK into apps so that they can understand what users are browsing and where they’re going in order to target ads. There are also privacy concerns

The ability to pair a mobile device with a household is seen as the Holy Grail for advertisers

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surrounding deterministic targeting. Both users and regulators have questions about whether it’s acceptable for advertisers to track users across devices using personal information like usernames or addresses. Finally, while data gathered using social logins is supposedly useful across devices, some do face roadblocks in certain places. For example, Google struggles to serve ads on iOS devices, while Apple has issues with those who browse using Chrome. ‘Social logins are not the be-all and endall of deterministic, however. Performance marketing technology company Criteo has developed its own deterministic solution which relies on customer IDs or other unique data points pooled by its advertiser clients. The company works with over 7,000 advertisers (and 10,000 publishers) and has invited its advertisers to pool these customer IDs and then share the pooled data, in order to identify the same user accessing the same website via multiple devices. This allows Criteo to gather user intent from one device and serve relevant advertising on another. “Advertisers give us anonymised customer IDs which are encrypted via MD5 and sit in the cloud, and are then turned into a key to allow matching across devices,” says Jon Buss, Criteo’s MD for Northern Europe.

JUNE 2015

“The advertisers are pooling their data; they put in a small amount of unique insight and get out a huge amount of value.”

Big data, bigger scope So if deterministic isn’t your solution of choice, what about probabilistic? Rather than relying on confirmed links between two devices, probabilistic methods (sometimes called statistical or predictive identification) use a wealth of first-, second- and third-party data along with algorithms and machine learning to track an individual across devices. Similar modelling methods are used in weather forecasting, pharmaceutical research and even in financial markets to predict trends, and grow more accurate every day. “We process roughly 40bn ad requests

“WE PROCESS ROUGHLY 40BN AD REQUESTS ON A DAILY BASIS, AND WE USE BIG DATA TO TRIANGULATE THOSE” NIMESHH PATEL, DRAWBRIDGE

on a daily basis,” says Nimeshh Patel, vice president for EMEA at Drawbridge, which operates probably the best-known probabilistic platform. “In those ad requests, because we’re a programmatic platform, we see device IDs and cookie IDs, and we use big data to triangulate those. It could be

ANALYSIS

something as simple as seeing two devices on the same wi-fi network and we can say there’s a statistical likelihood that they belong to the same user. But then we’ll wait and build up multiple observations, to the point where we have a very high accuracy rate with the identities we build.” The power of probabilistic lies in its openness and scale. A probabilistic platform can take thousands of otherwise meaningless data points and construct them into a portrait of a consumer that can be used to not only track them across devices, but also, give insights into their spending habits, demographic profile and interests. In addition, it doesn’t have the limitation of deterministic models, where the popularity of the social login forms a hard ceiling on what you can match. However, as the name implies, matches on probabilistic platforms are only estimations. Most solutions only offer accuracy of around 85 per cent, while some are as low as 55 per cent, although these figures are always improving as algorithms and artificial intelligence grow more advanced. In fact, when Drawbridge recently collaborated with Nielsen to conduct a study of its platform, it found that its model was 97.3 per cent accurate in its ability to find a relationship between two devices. Drawbridge has also recently added offline into the attribution mix by partnering

Advertisers want - make that need - to be able to track consumers as they move between devices

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

with third-party data providers and data onboarding platforms. Technology partners supporting the solution include Datalogix, which connects online ads to in-store sales; and LiveRamp, an Acxiom company that provides data onboarding services. Meanwhile, AOL recently revealed that it had developed a probabilistic attribution solution covering exposure to ads not just on mobile and desktop, but on TV too. The AOL solution can also cope with the final purchase being made in store rather than via a digital channel. The AOL solution has been validated by research from Comscore as having a 93 per cent match rate, though when pressed by Mobile Marketing, AOL conceded that the match rate when offline exposure and offline purchasing were brought into the mix was much lower, at 40 per cent.

Black box solutions Both forms of attribution have faced criticism for how they treat data, and the relatively opaque nature of how they match up devices. For deterministic attribution, brands are often forced to give up their hard-won CRM data to third parties like Facebook or Google for the matching process, which they have no access to. For probabilistic methods, agencies are often unclear on how matches are arrived at, and exactly how accurate they are.

“Marketers and agencies really need to get underneath the hood to understand what percentage of the audience is deterministic versus probabilistic, and for the portion that is derived using probabilistic modelling, exactly how they are matching mobile devices to users,” says Moxley. “Many, you will find, use a single data point – the last time they connected to a wi-fi network, for example – which can be horribly inaccurate.” So, with both solutions flawed in some manner, is there any scope for the two to work together? Many probabilistic platforms already submit data to deterministic models in order to check how accurate their matches are, using the more concrete deterministic data as their yardstick. “If you’re a probabilistic partner, you can’t not verify as to how accurate you are and how much coverage you have,” says Drawbridge’s Patel. “We have to do that. Everybody should be looking to do that.” Beyond that, there are hybrid models that aim to combine both approaches into a single identity solution, but these lead to problems of their own, with the potential for such platforms to cause even more privacy headaches than deterministic data on its own. “The enhancement of deterministic data with a probabilistic solution has the opportunity to significantly increase

Three screens, one consumer - that’s the challenge facing brands today

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reach and scale,” says Adbrain’s Davies. “We could see a world where the tech giants open-source their IDs, but it makes little sense for these players to allow their valuable user data to leak out or be shared with others unless ads are being bought or sold via their platforms, so expect any such solution to be more ‘data in’ than ‘data out’, meaning probabilistic solutions are critical to augment and enrich marketers’ existing data.”

He who clicks last, wins Cross-channel attribution has the potential to shake up the advertising industry in two different ways. The first is the Holy Grail of marketing – the closed loop, where marketers are able to track every interaction a consumer has with a brand, linking up initial brand messaging, retargeting and conversion across digital and physical spaces to give a complete portrait of the customer journey. While there are several barriers to this, including the difficulty of integrating bricks-and-mortar stores into this ecosystem, these should be overcome with the help of developments like mobile payment and location tracking. “Cross-channel attribution is the most transformative opportunity in marketing today,” says Davies. “Thanks to the digitalisation of offline purchasing I believe that within the next five years marketers

JUNE 2015

ANALYSIS

Not content with tracking consumers across devices, advertisers also want to measure the effectiveness of digital advertising in driving store visits

will be able to measure the complete path to purchase, bridging both online and offline. For this to happen, we’ll see closely integrated technology stacks whereby ad tech companies bridge proprietary IDs with a brand’s CRM system, effectively connecting online with the offline world.” The second fundamental change that cross-channel tracking and identification could bring is an end to last-click

“C RO S S - C H A N N E L C A M PA I G N S A R E MEASURED BASED O N W H AT R E A L LY M AT T E R S : AC T UA L S A L E S L I F T AT T H E CASH REGISTER” CHUCK MOXLEY, 4INFO

attribution. This is where the benefit for converting the user to a sale is given to the last ad or search result they clicked on before they made the purchase, even if they had carried out weeks or months of research across various devices, clicking on a variety

and search results in the process. While consumers are getting more and more comfortable with making purchases via smartphones, many still prefer to research on mobile then make the actual purchase on desktop. With a more accurate picture of how a consumer is interacting with a brand across devices, the time spent on mobile can be recognised as equally important in influencing purchase decisions, and rewarded as such. “If you look at who wins, on a last click basis, it’s the people who show an ad to a user on a very high level of frequency,” says Drawbridge’s Patel. “What cross-device does is make the whole thing far more efficient, because for the first time, you can offer a service that says, we won’t do that. We’ll allow you to follow that user from desktop to mobile, and we’ll allow you to frequency cap across devices. “Attribution models, and the way in which people are compensated, need to become far more attuned to protecting a brand’s reputation, and part of the answer to that is identity solutions that enable that frequency-capping across devices,” he adds. “If you protect brand reputation, marketers can become far more efficient with their spend.”

A cross-device future As mobile becomes more and more central to consumers’ purchasing habits,

cross-device attribution will move from an attractive proposition that can aid in retargeting to an essential component of every marketer’s toolkit. The question isn’t when it will be implemented, but what method will become dominant, and what changes it will go on to drive. “In the end, marketers need to make sure they and their agencies are aligned – from both a strategy and compensation standpoint – to ensure they are demanding that their cross-channel campaigns are measured based on what really matters: actual sales lift at the cash register,” says 4INFO’s Moxley. “More and more CEOs are expecting and demanding hard return on ad spend (ROAS) metrics to justify further advertising expenditures in digital media, and the era of measuring clicks, page views and even store visits will come to a close. The future will be about measuring cross-channel campaign ROAS based on actual sales lift, regardless of where the transaction occurs.” What cross-device attribution really represents is the realisation of mobile’s initial promise – a truly complete marketing ecosystem that uplifts every aspect of the industry that it touches upon. However it is implemented, and whoever it is that finally cracks it, a complete attribution solution is likely to transform the marketing world in a profound way. MM

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

watching Brief As with any new device, the future of the Apple Watch will depend on its apps, so we put a few of the Apple Watch versions of some of the more popular smartphone apps through their paces

ASOS

Amazon

BBC News

How do you take an experience as sensory as clothes shopping and condense it down into something that will fit on your wrist? In ASOS’s case, by condensing down its range to just the clothes that are ‘New in’, presented as a column of screen-filling images to be browsed through. After signing into your account on the accompanying iPhone app, each item can be marked as a favourite by tapping the heart icon. This pushes alerts to the app whenever a saved item drops in price or comes back into stock – and, without any direct transactional functionality, it’s also the only way to make a purchase from the app. Favourites sync across ASOS’s website and apps, meaning the transaction can be completed on desktop or mobile. The app is hugely simplified from what ASOS offers on other devices, but it’s considerably more fleshed-out than the Watch offerings we tested from other fashion retailers, such as Zara.

Unsurprisingly, it’s Amazon which has really mastered eCommerce on wearables. With probably the biggest catalogue of items in the world, Amazon makes no effort to narrow it down. Instead, it moves away from browsing and focuses on impulse buys, by pushing search front and centre. When you open the app, you’re confronted with a single search button, making neat use of Siri’s voice recognition to find your item. This is undoubtedly the best solution, though it does mean shouting search terms at your wrist – and sometimes repeatedly – if you let the app time out, there’s no way to access search history. Results are narrowed down to a top five, which can then be saved to a wishlist or even purchased outright. Buying requires setting up Amazon’s 1-Click function on the iPhone app but actually, once done, the process is smoother than your average mCommerce smartphone app.

It’s still not clear how to best squeeze complex news articles onto the Watch’s tiny screen. We’ll no doubt see the answer evolve over the coming years, but for now the best solution is probably BBC News. Compared to the Guardian app – which condenses the entire publication down to a single rotating top story, with a headline, photo and single sentence summary – the BBC takes a positively expansive approach. It displays eight headlines, divided equally between ‘My News’, based on the iPhone app’s customisable topics, and overall ‘Top Stories’. Each of these can be clicked through for a longer summary, pulled from the BBC site’s sidebar, along with a prompt to ‘Read more on iPhone’ – which unfortunately fails to take advantage of the Watch’s Handoff function. To squeeze in the extra content, the app’s design has to sacrifice images for text, but for at-a-glance news, it feels like a fair trade.

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JUNE 2015

ANALYSIS

Twitter

Citymapper

TripAdvisor

With no Facebook app in sight, Twitter is currently the king of social on Apple Watch. The app itself is split into two parts, ‘Timeline’ and ‘Trends’. The former displays recent tweets, five at a time, with a button to view five more. It’s not the easiest way to catch up with the past few hours though, which is where ‘Trends’ comes in. This displays the current top 10 trending hashtags and topics, with a synopsis of the news story where relevant. The lack of an Apple Watch browser unfortunately removes Twitter’s discovery element, but the rest of the social network’s interactivity is intact. You can retweet, favourite or even reply to tweets, either with an emoji or using voice recognition. One thing that is noticeably absent throughout, however, is advertising. We didn’t see a single sponsored tweet during our test; it will be interesting to see how long this lack of monetisation lasts.

While most Watch apps work by condensing the functionality from their mobile offerings, there’s very little that Citymapper cuts out. You can plan journeys across tube, train, bus, tram and even ferry – with each step neatly presented on its own screen – or view live departure times for nearby stations. It’s all laid out as cleanly and stylishly as the mobile app. In fact, the only concession Citymapper makes to the smaller screen is limiting destinations to two presets, home or work, to avoid the need to input addresses into the Watch directly. The app even makes space for a joke ‘Teleport’ option, and adds in a ‘Best times to leave’ feature, which provides the next three departure options before diving into the specifics of navgation. This is arguably the app’s single greatest feature, a way of answering at a glance that classic question: ‘Should I head home, or have I got time for another beer?’.

TripAdvisor isn’t necessarily known for innovation or stunningly attractive design, but its app feels perfectly at home on Apple Watch. The app is entirely location-based, serving up the best restaurants, hotels or activities within 1km, from nearest to furthest. Each can be selected to view their location, average rating, a summary of the last 10 reviews, and a gallery of user photos. It’s unfortunate that there’s no way to sort these listings by review rating, or tweak the maximum distance, but it’s all in service of keeping the app simple, and as this a Watch app, that’s understandable. Overall, TripAdvisor’s app is perfectly suited to the device. User photos, while often blurry when viewed on desktop, look great on the small screen, and the use case – being able to find somewhere to eat nearby without having to extricate phone from pocket – is exactly the kind of convenience that Apple Watch is selling itself on. MM

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JUNE 2015

COMMENT

Watch this space ATAO managing director Steve Ricketts looks at the issues brands should consider when assessing whether to develop apps for the Apple Watch

he Apple Watch is not ‘front and centre’ in your digital life like an iPhone or iPad. But perhaps it is not meant to be; at least that’s my view from living with the Apple Watch so far. In some ways it is like 4G (or fast wi-fi), it just makes things easier from the background and you notice its absence. Even more of my life is now digitally connected - but in a smarter way.

New lexicon Apple Watch brings a new lexicon to the industry with ‘glances, Taptic Engine, haptics, force touch, and digital crown’ as well as new ways of using existing technologies such as the accelerometer and handoff. Settings, very sensibly, are handled from an app on your iPhone. Major benefits include convenience, subtlety and fitness. If you thought your smartphone was ‘always there, always on’ wait until you try a good smartwatch. A smart marketer does not act on, or dismiss, a technology they have not genuinely tried. A smart marketer also understands how technology fits with their customer base and business objectives. If you match Audience, Technology and Objectives, it should deliver success. Right now, buyers are more likely to be tech-savvy early adopter or health/fitness sectors. Both can be valuable segments, given their profile and income, even before mass-market scale. Importantly with haptic prompts and richer visual progress updates, compared to other fitness wearables, it is better at actually changing behaviour. Independent, credible research is important but in short supply. One worthwhile read, however, is Shift 2015 from Mindshare and Goldsmiths University.

Quick win A quick win, with little or no effort, is the automatic inclusion of your brand Notifications, Passbook and SMS straight onto the Apple Watch. Start thinking about how these look on this smaller screen. Are they relevant enough that consumers do not turn them off? Context is critical and I hope Apple opens up additional ‘signals’ like heart rate, with clear customer consent, so brands can better optimise communications. So is extending your app to the watch worthwhile? For some brands it is a must

– their image cannot afford not to have an Apple Watch app. In fact there were over 3,500 apps at launch compared to 1,000 for the original iPad. From Starwood to Starbucks and from Twitter to Trip Advisor, we see watch experiences from convenient and subtle alerts through to payments and hotel room access in the real world. However some apps do not deliver anything useful, fun or better on the watch. Of the apps added to my Watch, half are already deleted. It will take time for Apple to open up more features to developers.

Brands also need to better understand customer context, just as early smartphone apps improved with time.

Native advertising The nature of the device, customer context and the need for scale in advertising means it will be a while before advertising becomes significant. But native advertising in news and content apps will be here sooner. There is an opportunity for brand campaigns reaching premium audiences, alongside complementary native on the iPhone, bringing scale. It is a ‘smartwatch’ but do not miss the bigger picture. We tend to label new things with old names, for example the ‘horseless carriage’ (cars), the ‘electric candle’ (light bulbs) and ‘moving pictures’ (movies). But when we do this, there is a risk of underestimating the change. Vehicles, artificial light and video have had much bigger impact than their original labels suggested. What will be the Watch’s WhatsApp, Snapchat, Uber, AirBNB or Instagram? Some of us have some ideas, but no one really knows yet. Start thinking of the step change opportunities and threats for your brand. Like most change, it is an opportunity and a threat to marketers. I have three recommendations for marketers considering the Apple Watch as a marketing channel. Firstly, analyse: get one, live with it. Understand the new technologies and customer context. Get independent research and insights. Secondly, think of the bigger picture as well the iterative things your brand can do. Thirdly, act when the time is right for your brand objectives and customers. Right, I’m off to pay for a coffee with my Apple Watch. Fancy joining me? MM

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COVER STORY

JUNE 2015

Accurate to the P int David Murphy talks location with Greg Isbister, founder and CEO, and Harry Dewhirst, president, at BlisMedia ome call it the new cookie, but whether you subscribe to this theory or not, there’s no doubt that when it comes to advertising on mobile devices, location can go a long way towards improving the relevance and effectiveness of your message. Because unlike your PC, your mobile knows more or less where it is, enabling brands to target consumers with a message that is highly relevant to them, based on their proximity to the thing you are talking to them about. And that, up until recently, was what location-based advertising on mobile devices was all about – driving footfall into retail when the brand could detect that the consumer was close to one of their outlets.

Audience groups Over the past couple of years, however, the options for using location to target ads to mobiles, tablets or even PCs have expanded. The new new thing is using location to create an understanding of the places a mobile user goes to and in doing so, use that data to build audience groups for brands. Analysis of this location data in conjunction with other data sets generates insights into the type of person they are, the sort of things they are likely to be interested in, which enables brands to serve up relevant ads at a time and in a place where they are in a position to do something about it. So the ad might be served in app on their tablet while they are watching TV at home in the evening, driving them to a brand’s website, rather than serving the ad to their mobile in the morning when they don’t have time to act on it because they’re on their way to work. One of the companies leading the charge in this new wave of intelligent, locationaware advertising is BlisMedia. Unusually

Harry Dewhirst (l) and Greg Isbister (r) are leading BlisMedia’s location revolution

for a company at the vanguard of mobile marketing, it’s been around for some time, having launched in 2004. The core Blis offering is its Data Platform, where vast amounts of location data is housed, together with offline data sets from a number of data partners, which layer richer targeting intelligence on top of the location data. Through real time bidding, Blis can access tens of billions of ad impressions a day across all digital channels and ad formats. The media agencies Blis works with can use the Blis platform to create custom audiences on the fly, finding matches with their client’s target audience within the Blis data set, and then using this as the basis for building campaigns.

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Accurate data There’s a lot of talk, of course, about ‘big data’, whereas at Blis, the focus is on good, accurate data from which valuable and useful consumer insights can be derived. “One of the big problems the industry faces is that location data coming back from an ad request is notoriously inaccurate, imprecise or even untrue,” says Blis cofounder and CEO, Greg Isbister. “Location accuracy can be defined as the proximity of a user’s stated location as per the ad request, compared to the user’s actual real-world location. The difference between ‘stated’ and ‘actual’ location can vary by a matter of a few feet, or by hundreds of miles. “We are extremely confident in the

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BlisMedia’s technology uses location to define an audience

their media budgets and target consumer audiences,” says Isbister. “We’ve also fostered excellent relationships with all our customers and built a great reputation in the global advertising community”.

Perfect storm

9am morning (travel to work)

8am Coﬀee shop on way to work

A day in the life of a typical mobile user as seen through the lens of location

accuracy of our data. We employ a team of data scientists who develop algorithms to filter and validate the data, using a sixstage process to eliminate bad location data, so that our advertisers are left with the most accurate location data on the market. We don’t think there’s anyone else out there doing location as well, or at the same scale, as Blis.” This commitment to data quality has served the company well. Through its partnerships with media agencies, it has run campaigns for 400 of the world’s top brands, and is now present across four continents, with further expansion plans on the near horizon. So after 11 years in business, why has the expansion happened now? “Mobile markets have matured and

Harry Dewhirst, an adtech veteran who joined Blis last July, believes Blis has benefited from a “perfect storm”. “The industry has caught up with the tech’s ability to run location-based ad campaigns at scale, which has not been 12pm lunchtime possible until now,” says Dewhirst. “Added (restaurant Roka) to that, the days when a brand advertiser could spray and pray, buying up so many impressions to buy brand recall, are over. There is so much available inventory now, which makes it so much more important to buy the right impressions, and to do that, you need the best, most accurate data sets.” So what, and where, next for Blis? “We’ll continue to add to our data sets and we’ll be relentless about our commitment 5pm Leave work to the quality of the data. We’ll also be opening up new offices in three (travelling home) key international markets by the end of the year,” says Dewhirst. “And obviously, in a space where the 6pm pick up rapid pace of technical innovation is crucial shopping to success, we will be continually investing in our engineering and product teams so we’re growing quickly with them. Our that they can help our advertisers take their customers are getting more sophisticated at campaigns to the next level, and deliver using complex data sets to helps them plan even better ROI than we do today.” MM

8am Coﬀee shop on way to work

12pm lunchtime (restaurant Roka)

6pm pick up shopping

Examples of location campaign creatives

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AWARDS

JUNE 2015

Awards time We are now accepting entries for the 2015 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards. Don’t miss this great chance to showcase your best work he 2015 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, sponsored by Theorem, are open for business. We are accepting entries across 36 categories, and this year as last, we will also be running four People’s Choice Awards, with the shortlist drawn up by a panel of industry experts and the winners chosen by a public vote. The Awards celebrate excellence in mobile marketing across the globe. Brands taking to the stage to collect an Award in 2014 included IKEA, Tesco, Sony Pictures, Renault, Cadbury’s, John Lewis, Walls Ice Cream, Rimmel London, BT and Lloyds Banking Group. No one knows, of course, who will triumph this year, but if the standard of entries is anything like what we saw last year, our judges are going to have a monumental task in picking the winners. The Entry Deadline is 7 August 2015, and the winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony in London on 26 November.

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JUNE 2015

AWARDS

You can find full details of how to enter, including the cost at www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/awards In the meantime, hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a full breakdown of the categories for 2015â&#x20AC;Ś

Services Most Effective Advertising Network Most Effective Advertising Technology Platform Most Effective Mobile-first Service Most Effective Publisher Offering

Products Most Effective Consumer Smartphone App Most Effective Consumer Tablet App Most Effective b2b Smartphone App Most Effective b2b Tablet App Most Accessible App Most Effective Smartwatch App Most Effective Mobile Payment Solution

Most Effective Affiliate Campaign Most Effective Mobile Advertising Campaign

Sectors Most Effective Charity Campaign Most Effective Financial Services Campaign Most Effective Entertainment Campaign Most Effective Travel & Tourism Campaign Most Effective Retail Campaign Most Effective Publishing Campaign

Grand Prix Award To find out more about becoming a Partner with the Awards, contact john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com

Campaigns Most Effective Programmatic Campaign Most Effective Native Advertising Campaign Most Effective Rich Media Campaign Most Effective Use of Video Most Effective Social Campaign Most Effective Brand Campaign Most Effective Sales Promotion Campaign Most Effective App Install Campaign Most Effective Tablet Advertising Campaign Most Effective Integrated Campaign Most Effective In-store Initiative Most Effective Location-based Campaign Most Effective Augmented Reality Campaign Most Effective Search Campaign Most Effective Loyalty Campaign Most Effective Guerrilla Campaign

Entry Deadline 7th August

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

Work in progress Most of the excitement around wearables has centred on consumer use, but as Alex Spencer reports, there’s a huge market for wearable tech in the enterprise

he wearables market currently stands at an inflection point. The early promise of Google Glass has faded away since Google stopped production of the current model in January, without any firm word on a follow-up. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch is selling quicker than Apple can produce the device, with orders reportedly somewhere around the 2m mark. But there is one segment of the market where the opposite is true, where smart glasses reign supreme and smartwatches

are struggling to find traction: the enterprise space. “Smartwatches and activity trackers are by far the biggest part of the wearables market, and they’re much more consumerfocused,” says Nick Spencer, senior practice director at market research firm ABI Research. “But if you look at smaller categories – like smart glasses, clothing or gloves – that’s all enterprise.” This year, a total 145.4m wearable devices will be shipped, according to statistics from ABI Research, just over a

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third of which (50.4m) will be to enterprise customers. Take smartwatches out of the equation, though, and while overall wearable shipments dip significantly, to 63.6m, the enterprise market is hardly dented, at 46.3m. What this means is that other wearables device categories will account for over 90 per cent of the total enterprise market. “Smart glasses in a way were hijacked by Google and seen as a consumer product for a little while,” Spencer says. “But I think that’s now reverted to where the business

JUNE 2015

was in the first place, which is in the enterprise sector.”

Smart glasses Smart glasses have a long history in the military and police force, and are increasingly being brought into warehouses and factories. Today, as well as Google’s offering, manufacturers including Vuzix, Epson and Sony all currently have smart glasses on the market, and these devices fall into two broad categories. The first, which includes Google Glass

as well as the Sony Attach and Vuzix M100 glasses, are known as ‘monocular’ or ‘heads-up display’ devices. This refers to the single optical display positioned over one of the wearer’s eyes, out of direct line of sight, so that the user can glance at the display only when they need it. The other category of devices is ‘binocular’. This includes the Sony Smart Eyeglass and Epson Moverio BT-2000 – and arguably, at the far end, Microsoft’s forthcoming HoloLens. Binocular glasses use a display that can be seen by both eyes,

ANALYSIS

in order to create a more immersive overlay of information. These devices enable an Augmented Reality experience, closer to what you might see in sci-fi films like Minority Report or Iron Man.

Tools for the task “When you look at the wide array of devices that are available, they are very much different kinds of tools,” says Jeffrey Jenkins, COO and founder of APX Labs, the company behind Skylight, a multiplatform enterprise solution for smartwatches and

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

glasses. “One is a hammer, and one is a screwdriver. You don’t necessarily use them for the same job – you use the form factor that fits the job most appropriately. “If you need to interact with other humans face-to-face very frequently, you’re

“THE IMPLEMENTATIONS FOR WEARABLES CURRENTLY ARE VERY SPECIFIC” NICK SPENCER, ABI RESEARCH

Shattered Glass? When Google abandoned the Glass Explorer Program in January, and moved the project out of its experimental Google X division, it insisted that this wasn’t the end for Glass. Tony Fadell, chief executive of home automation firm Nest, who became responsible for Glass under these changes, told the BBC that Glass had “broken ground and allowed us to learn what’s important to consumers and enterprises alike”, and that he was planning “to integrate those learnings into future products”. However, during the intervening months, Google has remained very quiet on the matter, leading speculation to bubble over. We asked our interview subjects if they had any insight on what the future might hold for Glass.

not going to want an immersive display over your eyes. You’re going to want to be able to make eye contact, so a HUDstyle device might be more appropriate. But if you’re doing work that’s relatively stationary, where there’s not much inperson interaction – say I’m on top of a wind turbine servicing it – there can be a value to having a binocular display, giving you a larger canvas of information.” As with any tool, there are a wide number of tasks where smart glasses can be used, but probably the single most common use case is remote assistance. This enables a worker in the field to stream video from the camera in their smart glasses back to an expert who can provide verbal advice, or send the specific information that they need to the glasses’ display. However, this isn’t the most efficient alternative because, as ABI’s Spencer says, “you don’t want two people constantly tied up with this one task”. The smarter option is an automated process that talks the wearer through a task, or gives them access to the supporting materials they need. This is the biggest potential growth area, and it’s an idea that could be applied to any number of business types. “There are four core scenarios that we address,” says APX’s Jenkins. “We’ve broken it down into people who are building

things, people who are fixing things, people who are moving things from place to place, and finally, those people who are operating large pieces of machinery.” There are few large-scale businesses which don’t include at least one of these scenarios somewhere among their workforce, and the list of companies – including Toyota, Boeing, DHL, Bosch, Virgin Atlantic and BMW – which have already deployed wearables internally in some capacity is not to be sniffed at. “Today in the enterprise, we have logistics, warehousing and field service applications in the medical space, in gas and oil, people that are doing training, streaming video applications where you have a person in the field and they’re having a problem so they get professional help from the home desk,” says Paul Travers, CEO and founder of Vuzix, the company behind the M100 smart glasses. “It’s an amazing list of applications.” Each of these verticals comes with its own use cases and challenges but whatever the situation, the key benefit to workers remains the same. “Unlike a phone, where you’d have to put your wrench down to read something, you can have key information displayed to you and interact with others without having to stop the work that you’re doing,” says APX’s Jenkins. Kevin O’Sullivan, lead engineer at SITA

Kevin O’Sullivan, SITA Lab: “People are saying ‘Google has abandoned Glass, it’s the end of the road’. But they haven’t, they’ve just abandoned their initial consumer approach really. I’m pretty sure they’ll be back later this year with new improved hardware. And if they can launch a model with a better camera, a better CPU on board, better battery life, that opens the door to a much wider range of use cases.”

Jeff Jenkins, APX: “What I can say is that Google is very, very clear about their commitment to Glass, to the industry and to making this successful. They’ve also been very clear on their support of their enterprise program for Glass. An enterprise customer can currently buy Glass in volume for their needs – and we’ve got customers who are purchasing Glass right now.”

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Paul Travers, Vuzix: “Part of the reason why we’re getting traction in the enterprise space is because of Google Glass, quite frankly. I think we can probably thank Google for that because they started incubators around Glass and now they’ve pulled back, you have these companies who are looking at taking their applications elsewhere, to other smart glass platforms.”

JUNE 2015

ANALYSIS

If the Glove Fits Smart glasses aren’t the only wearable making their way into the enterprise. ProGlove, maker of a smart glove, was founded by ex-BMW employees. In 2014, it was one of the winners of Intel’s Make It Wearable competition. The ProGlove device is made up of two components. While an Intel Edison chip in the permanent wristband handles the processing, with an LCD display to feed info back to the wearer, the glove itself is disposable. The material features an embedded RFID chip and circuits, and each unit is intended to sell at a comparable price point to standard industrial gloves. Lab, the research arm of air transport technology firm SITA, agrees: “Wearable

In combination, these two parts aim to replace the hefty scanners currently lugged around by workers in factories and warehouses, making the process hands-free. The gloves will also be able to identify the tools and parts being held by the wearer to help avoid human error, and enable the business to collect data to improve the process going forward. “The implementations for wearables currently are very specific,” says ABI’s Nick Spencer. “ProGlove is a good example because that was developed by people who used to work for BMW on the production line. Creating these products requires very specific knowledge.”

tech is great for staff who need to be roaming around a space, not sitting at a desk; staff who need to be connected to back end systems all the time for updated information; and staff who need to be hands free. That last one is the crucial ingredient. We’ve had a lot of people coming with a great idea that we could put on Google Glass, but when you look at the use case, you end up saying, why don’t you just use a phone or a tablet?”

Bring Your Own Device When trying to predict the future for wearables, mobile is the obvious point of reference, but it’s far from a one-for-one comparison, particularly in the enterprise space. Smart glasses are simply too bulky and expensive for the ‘BYOD’ (Bring Your Own Device) trend to be practical. Similarly, the increasingly common practice of having separate handsets for work and personal usage is unlikely to apply with a pair of work-issued glasses. The biggest difference, though, is simply in the kinds of workers who are given smartphones and smart glasses for work. While BlackBerry rose to prominence as the must-have accessory for businessmen, smart glasses are most commonly being used by blue-collar labourers. There is one device category that could possibly follow more closely in mobile’s footsteps,

“THE KILLER APPS FOR CONSUMER GLASSES WILL COME, WE’RE CONFIDENT OF THAT, BUT THE ROI FOR ENTERPRISE IS KIND OF A NO-BRAINER” JEFF JENKINS, APX though: the smartwatch. “In a way, the use case for smartwatches in white-collar careers is very similar to the BlackBerry, and the pager before that – entirely focused on communication rather than other applications,” says ABI’s Spencer. “As it evolves, I think things like filtering of messages, and more intelligent or subtle interaction with your communications, will become an important part of the use case. You could sort through your contact list and identify this person as a smartwatch contact, so you’ll get an alert from them on your wrist, but then filter out WhatsApp or Facebook during work hours. “As you start to filter and control your own messaging, that’s where people start thinking ‘yeah, that’s useful – it’s actually

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

called. When we introduced the wearable technology, it meant this waiting time could be used better – or just to relax.”

Targeting the enterprise

de-cluttering my digital life, rather than making it worse’.”

Productivity boost This is the very least of the benefits that wearables could offer businesses. In situations where smart devices are being deployed at scale, like manufacturing and warehousing, being able to shave even a single second off a task that a worker repeats hundreds of times a day is a major productivity boost. “Those numbers start to add up really quickly and it’s not hard to get people onboard with that idea,” says APX’s Jenkins. “The killer apps for consumer glasses will come, we’re confident of that, but the ROI

for enterprise is kind of a no-brainer.” “You might have to pay $1,500 for Glass, and that’s expensive, but the reality is that in a business your biggest outlay is staff,” SITA’s O’Sullivan says. “So if you can find some way to improve their productivity, then that amount is actually relatively modest in the grand scheme of things. “In the case of the Virgin Atlantic project (see panel opposite), the way that the dispatch process worked was that staff waited for the dispatcher to see a car coming and assign it to someone verbally. So the staff had idle time while they waited that they couldn’t used productively, because they always had to be half-listening for their name to be

Of course, it’s not just the businesses deploying wearables which stand to benefit. From the perspective of the manufacturers, there’s a major advantage in targeting the enterprise, as it sidesteps one of the primary problems these products have faced in the consumer market: the way they look. “To date, every piece of wearable technology has been very techy and clunky-looking,” says SITA’s O’Sullivan. “You need to be quite a nerd to go walking around with Google Glass on your head. But staff already wear equipment, and you can tell staff in a warehouse or a baggage hall: wear this, it’s part of your work, and at the end of the day you take it off when you’re done, and it’ll be a benefit to you during the day. People don’t want to wear something that looks ugly – but if you’re paid to wear it, you will.” “No one was ever berated for wearing a hard hat on a construction site,” agrees APX’s Jenkins. “You wear it because it performs a function, because it makes you safer and better at your work.” This is not to say that good design isn’t a consideration in the workplace, however. Vuzix’s Travers tells us that, even when the company was working with the US military in the ‘90s, its goal was to ‘cross the Oakley gate’. “Meaning, if we could make a pair of smart glasses that looked like a pair of Oakleys, then almost every military personnel would use them in the field.” More important than looking cool, though, is the practical consideration of real people wearing these devices nine to five in the workplace.

“WEARABLE TECH IS GREAT FOR STAFF WHO NEED TO BE ROAMING AROUND, NOT SITTING AT A DESK” KEVIN O’SULLIVAN, SITA LAB

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JUNE 2015

Virgin Territory Virgin Atlantic’s 2014 trial of Google Glass and Sony Smartwatch devices at London Heathrow airport remains one of the most high-profile deployments of wearable tech in the enterprise – and one of the few to hand this equipment to front-of-house staff. Virgin equipped staff in its ‘Upper Class Wing’ with wearables to make the VIP greeting process smoother. When a passenger’s car passed through a security barrier at the airport, they were identified using optical recognition of the license plate and their details were

pushed to a member of staff’s glasses or smartwatch. “From the passenger’s side, we were quite concerned about whether there would be a feeling of privacy invasion, when they turn up at the airport and a concierge is pointing this high-tech camera at them,” admits SITA Labs’ Kevin O’Sullivan, who worked on the project. “But in fact, the reaction was quite the opposite.” “Customers responded positively to an even more personalised and efficient service,” says Tim Graham, technology innovation and development manager at Virgin Atlantic Airways. “The devices themselves became a talking point, and many customers were impressed and commented that it was exactly the sort of thing that they expected Virgin Atlantic to do.” “At an airport, you’re used to having to validate your identity. You expect to be observed wherever you go, so the technology is being used in a way that doesn’t cross the boundaries of what people expect,” says O’Sullivan.

The trial also proved popular with Virgin Atlantic’s staff. So popular, in fact, that it ended up running for three months, nearly twice as long as had originally been intended. “These were staff who aren’t particularly used to having tech around them all the time, but because it brought them genuine value when dealing with these VIPs, they really liked it,” says O’Sullivan. “In fact, we had difficulty taking it away from them at the end of the trial, which is a great sign!” One of the trial’s key learnings came from the fact that both watches and glasses were tested, as O’Sullivan explains. “We thought Glass might be a bit too ‘in your face’ but it actually turned out to be more discreet, because the way you wear it, you glance up to the screen,” he says. “With the watch, however, you’ve actually got to turn down and look down at your wrist, and that’s the universal sign for indicating ‘I’m bored, I’d rather be somewhere else’. So those team members who were wearing the watches had to constantly apologise and explain.” Overall, however, the trial was considered a resounding success and while Virgin hasn’t yet reinstated wearables in this capacity, this certainly isn’t the end of the story. “We are continuing to investigate ways in which we could utilise wearable technology in other operational areas, such as airport customer service, aircraft turnaround and engineering,” says Virgin’s Graham. “We’re also looking at how we could utilise devices worn by our customers to provide a more personalised, relevant and efficient journey through the airport or on board the aircraft. “We are also currently undergoing a trial of Sony SmartWear in our engineering department, and will be looking at how wearable technology could benefit airport staff over the next few months.”

ANALYSIS

“Everyone wants their employees to feel comfortable during the day,” says Travers. “There have been many products in the enterprise space that have come and gone because an hour after you put it on, you have a headache from the weight of it.”

Cracking the market Cracking the enterprise market, with a device that looks and feels like something you might actually want to use at home, may prove vital to the future of the wearables industry. “If you look at the way smartphones made their way into the marketplace, most people’s first exposure to a smartphone – before the iPhone or even the BlackBerry, in the days of the Motorola Q and PalmPilot – was almost universally through a device that they worked with,” says APX’s Jenkins. “I think it’s going to be the same way with smart glasses. People are going to see them in the first instance at work, on the people working around them.” If smart glasses currently have an image problem – and the emergence of the term ‘Glasshole’ is probably enough to tell us that they do – then seeing them on friends and co-workers might be the best way to help normalise these clunky, nerdy devices. However, the enterprise market is more than just a means to an end for wearables. While the consumer popularity of smartwatches and activity trackers leaves smart glasses in the dust, they could find a natural home in factories, warehouses, and just about any other business where small, commonly-repeated tasks are the order of the day. As the technology develops, it won’t be the devices themselves that matter but how they’re used – just like any other tool in the workplace. “The smart glass technology is still too limited,” says SITA’s O’Sullivan. “To be honest, all wearable technology is very much in its infancy. I think it’s very possible to find an appropriate use case and put these devices to work and they’ll be of benefit for you but I don’t think we’re at the stage where we are with phones and tablets where it’s a general-purpose computing device that will be a net benefit to everybody. You have to choose carefully how you deploy it.” MM

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

FOOD FOR THOUGHT With restaurants starting to see the benefits of mobile payments and ordering systems, Alex Spencer tucked in to some of the payment-friendly apps currently being offered by restaurant chains in London fter a few years of relatively slow growth, mobile payment and ordering services have recently started to make a big push into UK restaurants. Wagamama, Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Wahaca and Hummus Bros all grabbed headlines in the first few months of the year, so we tested each of their app offerings – and learned a lot in the process. For example, while paying and especially ordering a meal on your smartphone might seem designed to take the human element out of the restaurant experience, these systems actually put even more emphasis on the people. Purchasing something as physical as a steaming bowl of noodles using an app still feels slightly alien to most customers, so it’s vital that staff are fully trained and on-board with the

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process to help make them feel comfortable. The mobile technology supporting this experience is just a bridge, and as with any bridge, what matters is that the ride is smooth. After all, you don’t think about the technology behind your debit card, whether you’re paying contactlessly or using a PIN, until it doesn’t work. In the best examples we tested, paying on mobile felt routine – like it was just another option alongside cash or card. Having a smart, well-designed app is a nice added bonus, but it’s a secondary concern to ironing out the bumps for customers, and making the entire process as simple and quick as possible. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what these four restaurants have to offer.

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ANALYSIS

Launched: March 2014 Powered by: PayPal Apple & Android

GBK offers two payment options, through FlyPay in its own app, and PayPal Local

While it was the restaurant’s integration of PayPal that we tested out, it’s also worth mentioning Gourmet Burger Kitchen’s (GBK) recently-released branded app. Powered by FlyPay – also behind the Wahaca app reviewed on p.31 – the app offers mobile payment capabilities, and the option of ordering meals for takeaway, plus support for special offers and GBK’s loyalty scheme. It’s considerably more fleshed out, which is to be expected, as PayPal’s app is designed to cater for a much wider range of businesses – in the ‘Local’ section, GBK sits alongside everything from small charities to individual people – so naturally the experience isn’t as neatly tailored to a single use case in the way the branded app is. This means that PayPal is left feeling a little bit like the poor relation. While GBK’s own app was being promoted around the restaurant, PayPal had no presence in store and the staff didn’t seem to be trained to use it. When we told the waitress, as instructed, “I’m paying with PayPal”, she presumed this meant through GBK’s app and, as this was the first PayPal payment she’d ever taken, she was obliged to go off and find a manager. PayPal lacks some of the bill management options of the other apps we tested, like adding a tip or splitting the cost, but it has a nice USP: the app only requires a photo of the customer for identification. This works well, eliminating the need to enter a long number into the phone, read it out to staff or scan a QR code – though in my case, this did lead to a little embarrassment, as the waitress laughed out loud when the scruffy selfie I’d snapped outside the restaurant suddenly popped up on her till screen. Overall, PayPal had less of an impact on the restaurant’s ordering and payment process than any of the alternatives we tested, and seems to be a good, cost-effective way for restaurants to dip that first toe into the water of mobile payments, before they invest in a more bespoke solution. This is true not just of GBK, but also Nando’s, Prezzo and Busaba Eathai, all of which have launched their own branded payment apps since partnering with PayPal.

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

Launched: March 2015 Powered by: Mastercard Qkr Apple & Android Wagamama was the launch partner for MasterCard’s mobile payment service when it came to the UK, and is currently the only restaurant chain in the country to have adopted it – but, firing up Qkr, you wouldn’t know it. The restaurant doesn’t receive top billing in the app, and only appears, in fact, when you search for nearby locations. This is understandable, given that MasterCard presumably wants to establish its own mobile payment brand rather than relying on its partners, but it might make adoption from Wagamama customers more difficult than if it was housed in a branded app. Step into one of Wagamama’s locations, however, and it’s a very different story. The restaurant where we tested Qkr had banners, place mats and table tent decorations promoting the app. And while, speaking to our waitress, it didn’t seem like there had been a flood of Qkr users through the door, the restaurant and staff were well-prepared to accept mobile payments. It’s worth noting that while Qkr does

offer an in-app ordering process to restaurants, Wagamama is currently only taking advantage of its payment aspect. This means there is still some interaction with actual human staff required – bad news for misanthropes, but a good way to sidestep the problem of looking like you’re running out on the bill. Speaking of the bill, it is replaced with an order screen that gradually fills up with items as your orders reach the kitchen, with a running total updated in real time. This alone makes for a strangely compelling experience, and it’s backed up by a robust payment functionality which makes it easy to split the bill and customise tips. The one thing that will convince people to use Qkr, though, is simply the ability to get up and leave without having to wait for a member of staff to bring the bill. The waitress said the app seemed popular for business lunches, which makes perfect sense – and while it might not be the right fit for some restaurants, it’s a neat complement to the casual shared-table style of dining that Wagamama offers.

Wagamama’s communal, quick-dining experience is a neat fit with Qkr’s mobile payment system

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ANALYSIS

Launched: September 2014 Powered by: FlyPay Apple & Android

The quirky style of Wahaca’s app fits with the brand image of its restaurants

Everything about the Wahaca app feels perfectly on-brand, from the real-time playlist of the music currently playing in your restaurant to the quirky loading messages. What really matters, though, is the payment process. While there is no ability to order using the app, Flypay’s payment functionality is impressively robust. The bill management feature, in particular, is impressively comprehensive, making it possible to split the bill by individual items, or by percentage, if you’re going Dutch. Either way, it neatly sidesteps that moment where everyone digs out a calculator app and goes quiet while they do their sums. Multiple people can pay separately on one phone, and each set their own tip. To save on the fiddly entry of long card numbers, it’s even possible to add a credit or debit card by scanning it with the phone’s camera. It’s a smart, fast solution which meant that, though we hadn’t originally planned to, our whole group ended up paying with the app. Vitally, the staff were well-prepared when we asked to pay with the app and our waiter even came over to confirm that the payment had been received. The Wahaca app does ask you to upload a photo, but doesn’t use it for identification purposes à la PayPal. Instead, to connect the customer with the restaurant’s EPOS, it requires you to enter the table number into the app. Not too difficult, given that these are one- or two-digit numbers, but Wahaca is also trialling QR codes in certain locations. The only slight issue with Wahaca’s app is an inability to look back at previous orders in the app, presumably intended to keep it simple and focused. However, like all the other apps we tested, it does use e-receipts, sent automatically to your email address once payment is complete. It’s hard to pick any holes in Wahaca’s payment offering, but it would be interesting to see if the restaurant could manage to integrate Flypay’s ordering functionality this smoothly.

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

Launched: February 2015 Powered by: Judo Apple & Android Hummus Bros is a small London-based chain with a focus on takeaways and quick lunches. Accordingly, its app is focused on placing pre-orders, then collecting a ready-prepared meal at a time of your choice – perfect if you’ve not got much time to spare or are doing an office-sized lunch order. The Hummus Bros app is centred around a simple, streamlined menu screen. Dishes can be customised, by choosing a size or adding extra sides, and store locator and loyalty functions are neatly integrated. I ordered a meal to be picked up 30 minutes later, and paid by debit card, which was all perfectly simple. The problem occurred when I arrived at the restaurant, reservation number and phone in hand, to find that my order had never reached them, despite the

system processing it and automatically sending a confirmation email. This led to a staff member awkwardly reading my order off the phone screen, explaining that the branch was encountering problems with its back-end systems. It’s possible that this was a one-off case of technical issues, but if the order had been larger or the store had been busier, this could be a real issue and, at the very least, it defeated the object of pre-ordering on mobile in the first place. If your average customer, trying out mobile ordering for the first times, hit this kind of bump in the road, it’s unlikely to matter what caused the problem, or whether it’s likely to happen again. It probably just means that they’re put off using the app again – or worse, that they’re dissuaded from trying out a different restaurant’s app in future. MM

While the Hummus Bros app is smartly designed, there were problems with its pickup process

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

The war for talent Changes in mobile technology are evolving the role of the marketer at a faster rate than ever before. Tim Maytom asks how firms can keep pace with this brave new world, and where they will find people with the skills to navigate these uncharted waters ccording to a recent study by the Mobile Marketing Association, jobs in mobile advertising are rising by around 40 per cent year-on-year in the US, with around 1.4m expected to be employed in the sector in the US by the end of 2015. The same study claims that around 70 jobs are created for every million dollars of mobile advertising spend. So with eMarketer predicting that global mobile ad spend will hit $64bn (£41bn) this year, we could easily be looking at around 4.5m jobs across the entire industry globally. That’s a lot of positions to fill for an industry that barely existed 10 years ago, and where new technologies are being introduced every day, bringing with them new skills necessary to make the most of their capabilities. In this kind of

“TECH GRADUATES MOVE WITH THE TIMES. IT’S THE GRADUATES IN OTHER POSITIONS WHO ARE POORLY TRAINED, AND WHO SEE TECH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE”

STEVE PARKER, M&C SAATCHI environment, hiring the right people and keeping them up-to-speed with the latest knowledge is a serious concern that all companies involved in mobile marketing should be addressing. Mobile technology is developing at a phenomenal rate, as talented start-ups find ways to radically disrupt existing industries with smarter, more personalised solutions. Technologies such as beacons, augmented reality and mobile payments are

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transforming the way brands and consumers interact with each other in the physical world. Improved targeting capabilities mean we can identify users across devices, using demographic, behavioural and even biometric data, while programmatic buying accelerates transactions with the power of automation and real-time purchasing. In such a time of constant change and innovation, it’s easy for firms to focus on staying up-to-date with the technology

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and forget that someone will always be needed to build the solutions, develop the algorithms and come up with creative ways to take advantage of the opportunities made available by the tech. Given the speed at which the market is evolving, the need for adaptable, knowledgeable, skilled employees has never been greater. But are they out there, and how do you find them? “The biggest challenge in our view is that none of this has been done before,” says Tom Pearman, sales director at Weve, the mobile marketing proposition created as a joint venture by O2, EE and Vodafone, and recently bought out by O2. “The smartphone is only seven years old, so you can’t get anyone that has developed a lot of these tools or products, as they are often being built for the first time. “For certain skills, the competition for talent is quite fierce, particularly in areas like data and agile technology programming and development. We require a huge range of skills at Weve, from programmers, data architects, data scientists, Java specialists, insight, research, account management and the marketing and sales team. The tech and data industries are exploding in London, so we have to compete for talent not only from the media industry, but from the start-up communities and also from traditional data companies.”

Skills to pay the bills The cross-pollination between ‘traditional’ marketing, technology companies and fields like statistical analysis and data insight began with the emergence of digital marketing, and has continued to accelerate with the dawn of mobile. It has proved to be the main driver behind the difficulties in staffing that

“THE SMARTPHONE IS ONLY SEVEN YEARS OLD, SO YOU CAN’T GET ANYONE THAT HAS DEVELOPED A LOT OF THESE TOOLS OR PRODUCTS AS THEY ARE OFTEN BEING BUILT FOR THE FIRST TIME” TOM PEARMAN, WEVE companies now face. According to research from the Online Marketing Institute, only eight per cent of executives considered their team’s digital marketing skills to be strong across all areas, while 71 per cent acknowledged they were “strong in some digital areas, but mediocre or weak in others”. Mobile marketing requires a diverse and ever-growing set of skills. Many firms rely on teams or individuals specialising in certain areas, or bring in third-party consultants, but this doesn’t solve every problem. Marketers with an overall command of the entire ecosystem are still needed, as are those who can join up thinking between the creative and data-driven sides of the industry. “We’re looking for people who can genuinely think mobile-first and put mobile ideas at the heart of an integrated media strategy,” says James Chandler, global mobile director at media agency Mindshare. “With mobile becoming so fragmented, it’s spawned pockets of highly-specialised

ANALYSIS

people in areas from app tracking and creative ad build, to location specialists and payment experts.” Weve’s Pearman agrees: “The mobile marketing space currently is a real melting pot of backgrounds, expertise and skills. At this stage of the industry’s maturity, it is important to bring a whole range of skills into it, so it is about looking at what skills and background people have, and how this might relate to mobile.”

Education, education, education One thing that most people working in mobile and digital marketing will readily admit is that developments over the past decade or so mean that the industry is increasingly focused on data and analytics. Firms have been forced to look to people with data science, mathematics and computing backgrounds to help grow this new kind of marketing. As WPP CEO Martin Sorrell noted at last year’s ad:tech conference in London, advertising today is not just about the mad men (and women) but equally, about the maths men. Sorrell went on to point out that of WPP’s projected $19bn revenues for 2014, media and data would account for $9bn, with digital responsible for another $6bn, leaving just $4bn generated by the ‘classic’ advertising business. “$15bn is in areas that Don Draper wouldn’t recognise,” Sorrell said. With changing needs come new problems. Marketers need to have a fundamental understanding of an everwider range of ideas to be truly effective. But with change occurring at such a rapid rate, it’s hard for people to keep pace with every development without dedicating all their spare time to staying abreast of new technologies and skills.

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

“There is an increasing need of people to be much more data literate, due to the accountability that digital and mobile media allows clients,” says Weve’s Pearman. “We are not yet in a place where people have started and finished their careers in mobile marketing, as the industry is still so new.” If it’s too much to expect people working in the industry today to be fully versed in every aspect of digital and mobile technology, then how about the marketers of the future? Are marketing courses, at degree level and higher, doing enough to train graudates in digital skills and data science? “We have seen over the last few years that digital elements of marketing courses have been increasing and improving, but there is still more scope for digital to be featured more heavily,” says Adam Manning, assistant PR manager for Argos at Home Retail Group. “Many courses tend to place a lot of focus on social, but with relatively little focus on other digital marketing skills.” If traditional marketing qualifications aren’t filling the need for technology, analytics and similar skills, perhaps the solution is to look to graduates in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects. “Tech graduates move with the times, as the whole community does,” says Steve Parker, strategy partner at M&C Saatchi. “It’s the graduates in other subjects who are often poorly trained, seeing technology as a foreign language they can never speak, rather than simply another way of expressing common problems.” However, these graduates are in short supply. A survey by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) into education and skills found that 39 per cent of UK firms had difficulties in recruiting staff with STEM

skills and knowledge in 2014, and over half were expecting problems in the next three years. “Despite a wide range of good practice taking place, driven by businesses, universities and schools themselves, links between the three to support science are still too rare,” said the CBI in its study. “This is disappointing, as the feedback from these schemes is usually positive, and such links can present a solution to issues around staff confidence and professional development, as well as inspiring students. This kind of engagement should be encouraged and incentivised – and businesses and universities need to do more.”

The mobile-first generation While formal training in the new frontier of marketing skills may be thin on the ground, the good news is that the current crop of marketers, entrepreneurs and innovators come from a generation of digital natives.

“WE WORK IN A NICHE MARKET AND SO IT CAN BE DIFFICULT TO RECRUIT PEOPLE WITH ALL THE NECESSARY SKILLS IN PLACE” GISELA ROMAN, SOMO Those born from 1990 onwards accept mobile as a central component of their lives and one of their primary channels to the wider world. “The new wave of graduates coming into the industry today who have grown up with mobile will think about mobile creativity in a fundamentally different way” says Mindshare’s Chandler. “For one thing, they absolutely won’t default to print, outdoor and TV as being the most creative means to tell New technology brings with it a need for new skillsets

a brand story. Instead, they will genuinely think mobile-first.” “Many students who are successful in joining us demonstrate a personal interest in digital, such as building their own app, designing their own website or regularly

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blogging or vlogging on a favourite topic,” adds Home Retail Group’s Manning. Consumers’ adoption of mobile has, in general, outpaced marketing’s ability to reach them. But as the new generation enters the workforce, already familiar with apps, overthe-top messaging and native marketing content, we’re likely to see an explosion in mobile marketing innovation. “The great thing about up-and-coming talent in the industry is that we all use our phones all the time, so as a consumer we understand what a good and bad experience is like,” says Weve’s Pearman. “We are in an era when grads will be entering companies like ours knowing far more about mobile, data and social than the senior leaders in companies. The challenge is to harness and nurture that insight without feeling threatened or wanting to keep these future stars in junior positions.” Of course it’s not just new graduates who have mobile at the centre of their lives. Every demographic of society is spending more and more time on mobile devices, and spending more and more of their money via

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ANALYSIS

Many graduates are attracted by the idea of working in a startup

apps, the mobile web and mobile payment systems. Marketers need to be able to think like consumers, reflecting on the way they interact with mobile in their own lives and adjusting their strategies to meet their own needs, to solve the problems they themselves are encountering on a day-to-day basis.

Focus on the fundamentals Perhaps the most important lesson for marketers to take on board is that many of the skills they’ve developed over the past 20 years adapting to digital are equally applicable to mobile. They just have to remain open-minded and creative about how they adapt their tactics to the mobile channel, and be prepared to spend time learning about the new avenues technology is opening up. “We work in a niche market and so it can be difficult to recruit people with all the necessary skills in place,” says Gisela Roman, senior operations manager for mobile marketing agency, Somo. “However, we recruit based on fundamental competencies such as marketing and business knowledge, and with our detailed induction scheme and hands-on training techniques, new hires can be developed relatively quickly.” This approach seems to be mirrored across the industry – find people with the right approach to marketing in general, and then use on-the-job training to develop specific skills in mobile. It ensures that mobile knowledge is rooted in practical applications, rather than theoretical models

or approaches too general to be of any use. “We definitely like to work with people that understand where the industry is heading, have a good understanding of data and also some of the basic rules and principles of mobile,” says Weve’s Pearman. “From a sales and marketing point of view, a lot of this is just a different ends to achieving a goal – so long as the salesperson understands the benefit to a client, it’s not too different.” Some experts are even more sceptical about the need to address mobile marketing

“WE’RE LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN GENUINELY PUT MOBILE IDEAS AT THE HEART OF AN INTEGRATED MEDIA STRATEGY” JAMES CHANDLER, MINDSHARE

as a specific skills gap, claiming that a focus on the overarching skills involved in marketing and advertising and a creative approach to the work is all that’s needed.

“If we adapted our training to the latest marketing fads we’d constantly be chasing our tail,” says M&C Saatchi’s Parker. “For developers, they have to focus on rigour, clarity and simplicity. This will remain the same no matter the pronunciations of marketing evangelists about spurious new campaigning methods.” While most marketers are more willing to accept mobile as a fundamental part of the industry now, there’s some truth in this statement. The core goal of advertising, after all, remains the same – getting the right message to the right person at the right time. As complex as the technology becomes, every evolution of mobile makes this objective easier. Maintaining a skilled workforce with up-to-date knowledge should be important to every company, but creativity, drive and dedication remain the most important qualities when it comes to recruitment. In fact, with technology opening up the marketing industry to people from a wider range of backgrounds and treating technical expertise as a complement to business skills, the opportunities to find fantastic marketers are arguably greater than ever before. Companies just need to remember that investing in the future doesn’t just mean pumping money into technology – it also means embracing a new vision of what a marketer looks like, one that blends the traditional creative with the cutting-edge analytical. MM

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

Stream On As the battle between Meerkat and Periscope pushes live-streaming apps into the public eye, Alex Spencer asks which is better – and whether brands should be getting involved ver the past year or so, video livestreaming has grown from niche concern to big-money proposition – just look at Amazon’s $970m (£625m) acquisition of game streaming service Twitch last August. When Meerkat – an app that enables people to share video or audio directly from their phones, and lets viewers or listeners comment on the stream in real-time – started attracting media buzz at the beginning of 2015, it looked like the moment live-streaming could truly enter the mainstream. Naturally, it didn’t take long for a major tech player to get involved – in this case Twitter, which in January paid a reported $75m for rival company Periscope. It launched the streaming app on 26 March and within 10 days, more than 1m users had signed into the service through the iOS app alone. Meanwhile, Meerkat saw its Monthly Active Users (MAUs) drop by around a quarter following Periscope’s launch, according to data from 7Park – from a peak of around 0.2 per cent of the iOS installed base in the US on 28 March, to less than 0.15 per cent a week later (see graph). So how did Periscope manage to sink Meerkat so quickly? Possibly because of the app’s USP, that streams stay available for replaying up to 24 hours after broadcast – but it seems more likely to be one of the benefits of being associated with Twitter, both in terms of branding and technology. During Twitter’s Q1 2015 earnings call, CEO Dick Costolo acknowledged that Periscope’s

The livestreaming battle is on between Periscope and Meerkat, with Periscope currently holding the upper hand

MEERKAT VS. PERISCOPE REACH — UNITED STATES MARCH — APRIL 2015

0.50% 0.45% 0.40% 0.35% 0.30% 0.25% 0.20% 0.15% 0.10% 0.05% 0.00% February 28

March 07

March 14

March 21

March 28

April 04

Data: Monthly active users (MAU) of Meerkat and Periscope as a percentage of millions of iOS users in the United States between March and April 2015.

In the first week of Periscope’s availability, its MAUs accounted for 0.5 per cent of all iOS users in the US – while Meerkat dropped to under 0.2 per cent (Source: 7Park)

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ANALYSIS

Periscope has benefitted from its association with the Twitter brand

growth had been possible “because broadcasters can share their Periscopes to Twitter to reach a larger audience”. For Meerkat, it’s a very different story. Twitter is baked deeply into the app – using

Like Meerkat, Periscope is available on iOS and Android

a Twitter log-in is currently the only way to sign up – but its access to Twitter’s social graph API was revoked in March, just ahead of the Periscope launch. This made it impossible to carry across connections from the social network, something it had previously relied on. But even with the competition bested, there may still be a larger problem looming for Periscope: who really wants to watch a real-time video of someone else’s life? In theory, there are two truly killer use cases for livestreaming. The first is sharing one-off live events such as concerts or sports matches, but the future doesn’t look too bright for this, as rights holders are keen to protect the lucrative television rights to these events. During May’s PacquiaoMayweather fight, for example, Periscope users were streaming the coverage from their

TV screens. Within days, Showtime Networks and HBO filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a list of streaming sites – a list which didn’t include Periscope, but could well in future if the app continues to grow. The other big opportunity is acting as a source of breaking news. Front-line reporting from protests, disasters and everything in-between has become one of the most celebrated uses of Twitter, and Costolo seems to be hoping the same will be true for Periscope, citing the “riveting” coverage of the Baltimore riots during Twitter’s Q1 earnings call. Right now, though, a Meerkat or Periscope session is more likely to yield Q&As from someone’s bedroom, shots of people’s meals, or just the streamer staring into their phone’s camera while they attempt to figure out how the app works. Nevertheless, marketers have already started their first cautious experiments with Periscope. In March, PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew used Periscope to give a behind-the-scenes tour of its office, reaching out to viewers with rewards after the stream was over. Spotify has used it to give viewers backstage access to up-and-coming bands, while Applebee’s streamed the launch of its new menu. There’s some appealingly rich content on offer – such as General Electric’s interview with scientists Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye about the science of the upcoming Jurassic Park movie – but the real-time nature of livestreaming presents some new challenges for marketers. Any content is ephemeral, lasting 24 hours at the absolute most, so brands either need to be broadcasting constantly or make sure their viewers are ready to watch at exactly the right moment. MM

“OVER THE PAST YEAR OR SO, VIDEO LIVESTREAMING HAS GROWN FROM A NICHE CONCERN TO A BIG-MONEY PROPOSITION”

Meerkat’s Leaderboard feature encourages its users to get involved and rise up the rankings

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INTERVIEW

JUNE 2015

Music to a brand’s ears We talk to Tim Hegarty, CEO and co-founder of Bagz.it, about how the company’s technology is revolutionising the battle for the second screen

nspiration can strike in all sorts of places, but the path to the creation of Bagz.it’s innovative second-screen content delivery technology began in a very different place to most mobile tech solutions. “I have been in a lot of different businesses, but for my sins, I used to be a professional songwriter,” says Tim Hegarty, the firm’s CEO and co-founder. “I wrote for the likes of Gloria Gaynor and D:Ream, and in my spare time I still write songs for my band, Derry. My producer and co-founder Alex Pilkington and I were in the studio bemoaning the fact that musicians are getting a very raw deal in the music industry these days, because people are streaming rather than buying records.” The discussion led Hegarty to investigate alternative ways for bands to monetise their content. Eventually, this resulted in the creation of the technology behind Bagz.it, which uses an inaudible

digital code that can be added to any broadcast audio content to trigger actions in a mobile app.

Cutting through the noise “Shazam is a great idea; your phone listens to the song and then does something on your second screen. That was the birth of the idea,” says Hegarty. “Shazam is all well and good, but it takes you through to iTunes, and nobody’s buying songs anymore. But we liked the idea of your phone listening out for something. “We’ve successfully tested this in a football stadium during a match, with just two iPhones, one broadcasting and one receiving. Because the app is not listening to the audio, it’s listening for the code, it’s able to cut across all sorts of background noise and deliver the second screen function. We’ve even tested it across Oxford Street, and it was able to cut through all the traffic.” The technology, which can be added

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into existing apps using an API, has huge potential for marketers looking to deliver second-screen content. The audio code required to trigger app actions can be placed in television and radio adverts, music tracks, PA announcements and more, and, once the API is in place, doesn’t even require wi-fi to work.

Facing the music The technology recently won a Best Innovation in Engagement award at FSTech’s 2015 Engagement & Loyalty Awards, and Hegarty believes it could revolutionise the way that brands and consumers interact in a wide variety of settings. “People pay a large sum of money to come and see a band live, but what do they do? They go on their phones the whole time,” says Hegarty. “Because our code can be broadcast over any medium, it means we can deliver that code out live. Imagine there’s 10,000 people at an open-air concert, and we push out the

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INTERVIEW

Tim Hegarty used his experiences as a songwriter to create the Bagz.it app, which offers an alternative way for musicians to monetise their content

code to the band’s app. Now, say the band has teamed up with a beer company – all of a sudden this message comes up, ‘Hey guys, thanks for coming to the gig, here’s a barcode for a free beer’. That’s the future of music: not selling music to music fans, but selling data relating to music fans to advertisers. “The beer company gets all that demographic data from their target market, but instead of spending a vast amount of money for what amounts to a big banner at the back of the stadium, they can connect directly to the people at the concert. That’s a big win for them. The band gets more from the sponsorship, because they can monetise that hard data by selling it to the brand. So the band wins and the fans win, because they’re getting something for free via an app they already have and value.” Second-screen content and advertising is now big business, and offers a massive opportunity to reach consumers.

According to figures from ARRIS, 56 per cent of viewers have engaged in secondscreening related to TV content they are watching. 35 per cent have used second screens to purchase items featured on the TV, while similar numbers have browsed for unrelated products or other content on a mobile device at the same time as watching the television.

Going for a song With such a huge audience to tap into, it’s no wonder Bagz.it’s technology has been making waves, and the company is in talks with several global brands and technology companies about potential partnerships. However, for Hegarty, it all comes back to reaching audiences in a way they like. “Everything in retail at the minute is about beacons,” he says. “I don’t know about you, but have you ever seen a mother with her two children at a supermarket, trying to fill her basket

while stopping her children from throwing things in? The last thing she needs is her phone to start beeping, telling her there are half-price bananas in aisle three. The technology already exists for that; it’s called a big plastic sign saying ‘half-price bananas’. You have to put yourself in the consumer’s shoes and think about it from their point of view. “There’s only so many ways you can say ‘I love you’ in a song, and there’s only so many ways that you can sell to people without boring them. If every song was just ‘I love you’, then it’s going to get boring. It’s all well and good having the technology, but you have to come through a different window and ask ‘what is the best way of using this technology?’ For everybody; not just for marketers, but for audiences as well. With our technology, we’re giving marketers a chance to actually connect directly with their customers.” MM Find out more at www.bagz.it @mmmagtweets

ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

The Mobile Video Challenge Todd Tran, SVP of programmatic and mobile at Teads, considers the potential for mobile video and the strategies to adopt in order to use it successfully

o date, 2015 has signalled a pivotal stage in the growth of mobile advertising. The sixth and last annual IAB Mobile Engage was held in May, marking an important phase in the medium’s transition from digital add-on to an integral part of the marketing mix. In the same way that digital has ceased to be a silo, mobile no longer stands alone. But can the same be said of mobile video? Mobile video is the youngest sector of advertising, it’s the fastest growing, showing 142 per cent growth year-onyear, according to the IAB PWC Full Year Online Ad Spend Report 2014, and possessing the most potential. According to the September 2014 Teads Censuswide Research study, the average Gen Y user now owns 3.6 devices and they enjoy video – one in three already watch video every day - illustrating the opportunity afforded by mobile video advertising as a medium.

Dedicated strategies However, is mobile video ready to be incorporated into the wider campaign plan, or should dedicated mobile video strategies oversee its growth? At Teads we often manage campaigns which seamlessly integrate mobile and desktop video advertising, yielding improved reach and effectiveness. However, it’s vital that mobile video is still carefully considered when running a video advertising campaign, in order to address its idiosyncrasies.

The video content promoted by advertisers needs to be different on mobile devices than it is for desktop. Users consume content on mobile in a very different way, preferring short, snappy bursts. When running a campaign on mobile, brands are advised to use content which is 15 seconds long, rather than 30-second material which is typically

Consider instead the other end of the scale - premium publishers such as The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Independent. They all have apps, but the vast majority of their mobile traffic is driven by mobile web. By only advertising in-app, brands are missing out on the reach of these publishing behemoths and reducing the quality of their advertising

“NEW FORMATS WHICH WORK ACROSS ALL DEVICES ON iOS PROMISE TO BE A GAMECHANGER FOR THE INDUSTRY” successful on desktop. When dedicated video content for mobile devices becomes standard, mobile will no longer be discussed as a separate silo in larger video ad campaigns. Once the content has been mastered, the distribution method must be examined. Speak to any mobile video provider and they will typically tell you that users spend up to 85 per cent of their time in app rather than using mobile web. However, when this is broken down, it becomes apparent that the data is skewed. Just think of the time spent every day on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, where traditional video distributors cannot reach the user with video ads, yet which counts as in-app time. The exception to this is gaming. For many advertisers, however, this does not offer an appropriate, brand-safe environment.

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placements. If mobile video advertising is to come of age, it is imperative that the myths surrounding in-app and mobile web placements are dispelled.

iOS challenges A further challenge to mobile video advertising is the difficulties surrounding iOS. Traditionally, it has been impossible to serve an outstream video format, where the video plays within editorial content, on iPhones. Premium publishers often rely on these outstream formats to complement their instream video advertising offerings. iPhone traffic makes up a large proportion of mobile traffic in the UK and the US, and if outstream formats cannot operate on iOS, the growth of mobile video advertising will be limited by lack of inventory. But a breakthrough is just

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ANALYSIS

Video advertising is increasingly popular across all screen sizes

“BY ONLY ADVERTISING INAPP, BRANDS ARE MISSING OUT ON THE REACH OF THESE PUBLISHING BEHEMOTHS”

Mobile demands shorter, snappier bursts of content

around the corner; new formats which work across all devices on iOS promise to be a game-changer for the industry, and will propel mobile video forward. Mobile networks have recently made a lot of noise around users being justified in using adblockers to avoid advertising in a bid to reduce data charges. This issue is particularly pertinent to mobile video advertising, where users who are not using 3G or 4G will not enjoy a seamless advertising experience. The answer? Do not force users to watch mobile video advertising using intrusive pre-roll formats. It is also vital to only serve adverts when in view; the video should not play when the format is not viewable. By targeting to wi-fi and using outstream formats which are engaging and allow the user to skip the ad should they so choose, advertisers will deliver a better advertising experience. If the user and networks are happy, then

mobile video advertising will be able to grow uninterrupted. To resolve these issues, advertisers and brands need to put mobile video advertising at the forefront of their plans. The content needs to be specialised and the distribution methods really need to work. On the side of the video advertising distributors, more needs to be done to ensure that the formats work effectively across every single device and that the experience is both engaging and enjoyable for the user, by employing outstream formats as an alternative to pre-roll on mobile. Mobile video advertising is by far the most exciting sector of the online industry. Part of the reason it is the most exciting is because it still has room to grow and shape the mobile market. It hasn’t quite hit maturity yet, but we’re looking forward to seeing it develop over the next few months. MM

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CASE STUDY

JUNE 2015

Football publication sees 39 per cent drop in visitor bounce rates with mobile optimization, saving thousands on a responsive web solution nside 72 (www.i-72.co.uk), a UKbased online publication dedicated to the Football League, has been using the Netbiscuits Analytics and Device Detection platform to better understand its user base and to optimise content for visitors across multiple devices. Founded in 2014, Inside 72 produces interviews and features for some of the most dedicated football fans in the country, attracting up to 45,000 unique visitors each month. After uncovering high bounce rates, managing editor John Coulson decided to re-evaluate the company’s content marketing strategy. The publication produces long-form articles, which are driven by high-resolution photography and video, which Coulson believed could impact visitor experience on certain mobile devices. However, rather than guessing, Coulson wanted hard data to establish what was happening online.

Loading issues “We knew from basic analytics that up to 62 per cent of our visitors were reading one article and bouncing, but that didn’t really tell us the full story,” says Coulson. “We knew that our mobile site was quite clunky and had some loading issues, particularly on iPhone, but before we could re-evaluate and take the next steps, we wanted to get the full picture of what was going on and how visitors were behaving, based on the device they were using. We weren’t going to spend thousands on a new responsive website if there was a simple solution.” Inside 72 selected Netbiscuits Analytics and Device Detection after reading about the tools in the technology media, initially taking advantage of a free 30-day trial. After installing the Java script, Coulson was able to start getting insights into the website’s visitors in a matter of hours, revealing immediate insights to the team.

“Our old web agency had assured us that at least 95 per cent of traffic was desktop; however we quickly saw that 75 per cent were on mobile devices. Device Detection broke down the screen sizes of our user base and even the browsers they were using, which might sound over the top, but was very useful when planning further down the line. Next, we looked at the Visitor Flow dashboards on Netbiscuits Analytics. We were able to look at the entire visitor journey, from page-to-page, by device, and spot where people were bouncing, which confirmed we had a problem with visitors on mobile devices, as desktop users were not leaving at the same rate. “We drive a lot of traffic through social media, using video and quiz content to capture interest, but understanding how that is working can be hard with a small team like ours. We were quickly able to set up Visitor Flow and some simple conversion

Inside 72 deals with the less glamourous end of the UK football scene, the 72 teams in the three divisions below the Premier League

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CASE STUDY

What Inside 72 did with Netbiscuits Used Netbiscuits Device Detection to understand which devices were hitting the website and the browsers, screen sizes, bandwidth and connection speeds.

Inside 72 was told that at least 95 per cent of traffic was desktop. In fact, it discovered that 75 per cent of visitors were on mobile devices

rules to show where traffic came from and what they did while on the site. For example, we saw that our desktop and mobile users came in from Twitter at a similar pace, yet, while desktop stayed and moved around pages, mobile users bounced on the landing page. Again, a sign that we had to act.”

Optimised content Armed with these insights, Inside 72 was able to implement a number of changes Inside 72 has seen dwell time on mobile devices increase by 63 per cent since deploying the Netbiscuits platform

which meant that content could be optimised for multiscreen devices. The solution, driven by WordPress, cut some elements of video from the mobile site, but offered visitors the option if they wanted to view it. The results have been impressive, with bounce rates dropping by 39 per cent. This improvement has coincided with two new longterm advertising partnerships, which were driven by the website’s ability to deliver in-depth content to a specific demographic and on any device. “The product has paid for itself six times over already, which is the ROI we wanted from the project,” says Coulson. “We knew there was a problem with mobile, but honestly, other than throwing money at an agency, we didn’t know how to fix it. Using Netbiscuits we were not only able to see exactly how users were behaving, but we also discovered a simple fix using WordPress, that cost £250, rather than the £7,500 we would have spent on a responsive project. “Our mobile site is exceptional now and the feedback from our visitors has been great. We’ve also seen dwell time on site by mobile devices increase by 63 per cent. That is not a coincidence visitors won’t tolerate any delays or poor experience, so to keep them clicking through content and engaging, we have to keep delivering on performance.” MM

Evaluated Visitor Flow – showing where referrals came from (Twitter, Facebook, Organic) and how those users behaved while on site (when they exited, how long they spent online) by device type. Identified growth of the smartphone and tablet visitor base, as well as performance issues on both devices. Tracked sign-ups to the magazine’s newsletter using the Netbiscuits Analytics conversion tool. These increased by 39 per cent between April and May 2015. Based on analytics, Inside 72 shut down its mobile website and moved content to a WordPress-driven layout that was optimised for the company’s top five mobile devices.

Netbiscuits Mobile Analytics is available via a free 30-day trial subscription at www.netbiscuits.com/mobile-analytics

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JUNE 2015

COMMENT

Instant Gratification David Murphy considers the implications for the publishing industry of Facebook’s recent launch of Instant Articles

hings have been tricky enough for news publishers these past few years, what with declining print circulations, paywalls, and then this incessant shift in consumer behaviour towards accessing content on mobiles, tablets and now even smart watches. What works in a broadsheet print format, of course, doesn’t work so well on a mobile device, and when it comes to a watch, one of the new breed of ‘glanceable’ devices, there’s barely room for a much-truncated headline. Somehow, news publishers have just had to deal with it as best they can, doing their utmost to see the opportunity in the threat. And now along comes a new threat/opportunity, from Facebook, with the launch of Instant Articles. This will give news organisations the chance to publish their content directly into Facebook’s iOS app, rather than requiring the user to click on a link to the story which would take them out of the app to the publisher’s own website.

Richer experience Facebook says that one of the key benefits of the new service is speed. In a blog post, the company writes: “As more people get their news on mobile devices, we want to make the experience faster and richer on Facebook. People share a lot of articles on Facebook, particularly on our mobile app. To date, however, these stories take an average of eight seconds to load, by far the slowest single content type on Facebook.

Instant Articles makes the reading experience as much as ten times faster than standard mobile web articles.” Publishers will also be able to take advantage of interactive content options such as embedded video, animated maps and such-like. Publishers can even create bespoke content that will only appear

Atlantic, BBC News, Bild, BuzzFeed, The Guardian, National Geographic, NBC News, The New York Times, and Spiegel Online, are on board. They are either confident about the benefits that Instant Articles will bring them, or terrified about being left out. For while Facebook insists that it will not prioritise Instant Articles in the News Feed, they will naturally rise to the top of a user’s News Feed the more he or she clicks on them.

Reassuring tone

Instant Articles — threat or opportunity?

on Instant Articles, not on their own site, though it’s not clear why anyone would want to do that. When it comes to ad revenue, the source publisher keeps 100 per cent of the revenue from any ads they have sold. Revenue from any ads sold via the Facebook Audience Network alongside the content will be split 70:30 in the source publisher’s favour. Now you might think that many publishers would be extremely nervous about a move that lets Facebook users see their content without having to come out of Facebook and be driven to their own site, but at launch, nine publishers - The

Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox strikes a reassuring tone when he says: “Fundamentally, this is a tool that enables publishers to provide a better experience for their readers on Facebook. Instant Articles lets them deliver fast, interactive articles while maintaining control of their content and business models.” But perhaps the most telling comment in the blog post comes in the last line of a quote from Tony Danker, international director, Guardian News & Media. He says: “It is great to see Facebook trialing new ways for quality journalism to flourish on mobile. The Guardian is keen to test how the new platform can provide an even more engaging experience for our readers.” Danker then concludes: “It is then vital that, over time, Instant Articles delivers recurring benefit for publishers, whose continued investment in original content underpins its success.” Good luck with that one. MM

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COMMENT

JUNE 2015

Confessions of an Apple Watch developer Nimbletank co-founder Chris Minas reflects on the pros and cons of developing apps for the Apple Watch n case you missed it, Apple launched its eagerly anticipated Watch product on 24 April. Now that the glitz and glamour of the launch has calmed down, designers and developers are exploring new ways to extend mobile app experiences to the Watch. Here’s what we have learned in developing for it so far.

very well designed but we can’t build anything as good because the WatchKit SDK is so locked down at present.” This is due to the restrictive software development kit. Presently, the Watch is acting only as a display extension to the app on the phone. Personalizing integrated experiences from data gleaned from the

Confession #1: It’s all about the UX Before starting development, design and user engagement considerations are key. As with mobile, the biggest mistake is to try and squeeze too much content into the shop window. Quick interactions and simple messaging is what the Watch is all about. So start thinking about ‘wrist-first’, and moments where your brand can be useful in the context of a 2” screen on your arm. This is harder than you might imagine. Vibrations, pings and beeps can all act as personalized notifications for specific content or behaviour. Think about which functionality should stay on the phone (which the Watch is required to pair with) and which can be more useful as “glances” or alerts on the phone. Functionality that requires multiple touches or more than two levels of menu is best reserved for the phone app. So keep it really simple, with as few taps and touches as possible, and then leverage notifications as emotional references.

Confession #2: WatchKit is painfully limiting “The Apple Watch hardware is locked down more than we thought or expected,” said Wendy, one of our lead experience technologists. “The Apple Watch’s built-in apps like Messages, Maps and Activity are

team was that developing for the Watch required twice the effort of smartphone app development. Developing for the Watch requires smarter, wrist-first thinking. But what about the technical detail? You have to think about developing new features such as communication bridges between the two devices as well as the Watch app itself. Data input forms can be slow and buggy so consider the fact that information should only be presented on the device and not require input to be taken from a user as input fields. Collecting data visually via the use of smart icons or images would be a better approach.

Confession #3: But it’s not all bad

device is not possible as yet. Even displaying animations that create a bit of user joy is tricky. Danil, one of our brightest mobile engineers, was frustrated at the lack of depth in Apple’s Watchkit. “I would say that WatchKit is too high-level and has many restrictions, and does not allow developers to use all their potential and skills,” he said. “I am extremely disappointed with Apple Watch and WatchKit,” said another. “I hope that in the next WatchKit release Apple will allow developers to use everything they want, allow you to go to a lower-level and do more of what you want to do, the way it works on iOS.” In fact, the general consensus from the

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Developers are not easily pleased, so it’s no surprise that there is more negative feedback than positive. They want to create beautiful new experiences with unlimited possibilities, whereas Apple doesn’t want the device batteries to be flat by lunchtime, thanks to apps that are too demanding or crash. According to our developers: “Xcode 6 integration for the watch is really nice and straightforward. When building your app on the phone it syncs to the Watch directly.”

Confession #4: Forget everything you think you know There is plenty to consider: haptic feedback, glanceable interfaces, and the fact that if it’s not a quick app experience suited to holding out your arm, then people will likely get their phone out of their pocket. Like the first websites and the first native apps, there is plenty to learn, relearn and improve upon before Watch apps have a meaningful role in people’s lives. Let’s all learn to think wrist-first and see where it takes us. MM