Mobile Marketing June 2016 by Mobile Marketing Magazine

ISSUE 23 • JUNE 2016

BIGGER PICTURE ISSUE 23 • JUNE 2016

Why creativity on mobile is about more than the screen size

RIO CALLING Looking forward to the most mobile Olympics ever

SOCIAL STANDING How Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al shape up on the advertising front

CRM 2.0 Chatbots explained

The P wer of Where

Digital Element on targeting mobile users at scale right down to postcode level

PLUS: 2016 Awards Open for Business • Innovation Lab • GetMondo: Banking Reinvented

WherE You go defines who you are You are capable of more than you realise. The same is true for your advertising. Push your limits with Blis.

LOCATION DATA MAKES ADVERTISING WORK

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JUNE 2016

CONTENTS

IN THIS ISSUE : 5

brand STRATEGY Digital bank Mondo tells its mobile story

6 Hello and welcome to our latest print edition. If you’re reading this in Cannes, remember, there are some conference sessions you’re free to attend... Though it’s true, most of the best business is done, if not on the beach, then at least on a yacht. Cannes is swamped at this time of year by ad industry types and creativity is high on the agenda, so what better time to take a deeper dive into creativity on mobile, looking at what it is and how much of it there is about? You can read the piece on p8. We’re all set for a summer of sport, with Euro 2016 in full swing, and the Olympics due to begin in a few weeks’ time. So we asked Tim Maytom to investigate how mobile-friendly the 2016 Games will be, what opportunities they present for brands, and what challenges, in the form of things like live streaming and drone technology, for the organisers. Read Tim’s piece on p12. All this sport means a big summer for social, of course, so Alex Spencer has been looking at the ad opportunities available to advertisers on the biggest social platforms. You can catch Alex’s piece on p20. On top of all that, we hear from Digital Element on using location to target mobile users at scale; from Voluum on tackling digital ad fraud; and from Aurasma on augmented reality. Plus, news of our 2016 Awards, and a primer on Chatbots. Are they the future of CRM, or just a flash in the techno-pan? Whether you’re in Cannes or Cardiff, enjoy! David Murphy, editorial director

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NEWS REVIEW

8 12 THE MOBILE

OLYMPICS

How mobile-friendly will the Rio Games be?

creative thinking As the ad industry gathers in Cannes, we delve into what creativity looks like on mobile

18 Digital Element on targeting mobile users at scale

44 FIGHTING

FRAUD

How Voluum is addressing the problem of digital ad fraud

47 LOCATION

EVOLUTION

17 PORT IN A STORM How the publishing industry is tackling the shift to digital

20 social standing

28 CHATBOT 101

The 2016 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards are open for business

36 INNOVATION LAB We look at some of the more unusual offerings from the world of tech

39 PIZZA

PERFECTION

How Papa John’s uses hyper-local mobile targeting to great effect

48 REALITY.

AUGMENTED

Using AR to deliver immersive digital experiences

All you ever needed to know about Chatbots

32 ENTRIES PLEASE!

How the business of location data is maturing

We look at the ad offerings of the major social media players

41 SEE CLEARLY,

SPEND BETTER Cake’s approach to mobile advertising

X-FACTOR 42 THE We take a closer look at 2-factor authentication using mobile SMS

49 SNACKING

TIME

Amuzo MD Mike Hawkyard explains how brands can tap into mobile moments

50 CANNES: YOU

BELIEVE IT

IAB UK COO Jon Mew takes stock of the digital ad business

Editorial director: David Murphy – david.murphy@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)7976 927062 Managing director: John Owen – john.owen@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)7769 674824 Commercial director: James McGowan – james.mcgowan@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Business development manager: Richard Partridge – richard.partridge@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Online editor: Alex Spencer – alex.spencer@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Reporter: Tim Maytom – tim.maytom@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Events manager: Rebecca McRobb – rebecca.mcrobb@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Designer: Alistair Gillan – jag@aQ2.info Contributors: Jason Bates, Amir Malik, Jon Mew, Print: Crystal Press Limited – sales@crystalcp.net 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., 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

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JUNE 2016

COMMENT

brand STRATEGY BY JASON BATES, CO-FOUNDER OF MONDO

y bank already has an app. That’s what I hear from people when I tell them that I’ve just spent the last two years building a new digital bank, and they’re right! Their existing bank has an app, a website, a call centre, and more than a few branches - offering what bankers call an ‘omnichannel experience’.

Customer satisfaction Most traditional bankers think digital banking is great. It lets them sell more traditional commodity financial products like current accounts, credit cards, and loans with targeted digital advertising. It also increases customer satisfaction and decreases the costs of servicing customers dramatically. Win-win. Most people are also reasonably happy with their bank. They trust their money is safe, and although they may have some gripes about being caught out with unexpected charges, they aren’t running to change banks. The annual switching rates for banks is about 3 per cent, and in a recent CMA survey, 37 per cent of people reported that they had been with their bank for more than 20 years. So how will a new digital bank like Mondo succeed, if the big banks are already there and customers are happy? Customers do generally think that their banks are okay, but when you ask them about their monthly finances, they give you a shrug, and look slightly sheepish before diving into all kinds of crazy stories of how they manage the monthly glide path between paydays; deal with recurring annual, quarterly, and monthly bills; send money to friends; save for holidays; open joint accounts with partners; and try to either keep track of things in notebooks and

spreadsheets, or more commonly, try not to think about it and hope it all works out. The problem is that what we think of as digital banking is actually just digitized banking. Putting a copy of a newspaper onto an iPad is not digital news; selling ‘albums’ on iTunes is not digital music; and getting fast access to taxi numbers is not digital transportation. In the same way, looking at a copy of your paper statement and out-ofdate balance on your iPhone isn’t digital banking. Digital is not just a new channel; it can fundamentally change traditional financial products into real-time intelligent contextual services.

Intelligent services Banks should be less like bad landlords and more like great waiters. So rather than providing cryptic statements and basic transactions, while making profits from customer’s mistakes, digital banks like Mondo pursue a different path. Creating a next-gen digital bank, Mondo aims to provide intelligent services that make customers lives easier, save them money, and help them feel more in control, while dropping the punitive fees and charges that traditional banks apply.

From letting you know that your electricity bill is 30 per cent higher this quarter than last quarter, or advising you that you are likely to run out of money four days early this month, to smoothing bumpy annual bills, or putting a stop to that habitual balance check on the train, because we aim to let you know if anything unusual happens. There is a whole world of new intelligent services that can provide consumers with the digital equivalent of a personal banker, giving them the support so that they can get on with their day. And of course this will only become more powerful as we work with a growing community of customers to build new relevant services, and partner with an army of other fintech companies to integrate savings, borrowing, investment, and analysis into the banking app through secure Application Programming Interfaces. So yes I tell them, your bank has an app, but you’ll look back in a few years and realise that it wasn’t digital banking. MM

@mmmagtweets

NEWS REVIEW

JUNE 2016

NEWS

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

Ad Blocking Debate Uncovers Legal Issues

n the ongoing debate over ad blocking, the past few months has seen the central question shift from whether this behaviour is ethical, and where it’s come from – to what is and isn’t legal. This all started at the end of March, when Adblock Plus won a court case brought against it by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, regarding its controversial ‘Acceptable Ads’ program. The court ruled that its policy of charging larger publishers for inclusion on the whitelist was indeed legal – the fifth ruling in Adblock Plus’ favour. Nevertheless, publishers haven’t been dissuaded from pursuing legal action against the ad blocking threat. In April, the NAA newspaper group in the US sent a letter to Brave, the web browser with baked-in ad blocking

founded by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich, which claimed Brave’s plans for replacing publishers’ existing ads with its own were “blatantly illegal”. The NAA’s members said they “intend to fully enforce their rights… including but not limited to statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work”. On the flip side, privacy campaigner Alexander Hanff attracted controversy on Twitter after sharing a letter from the European Commission that appeared to back up his claims that it might not be the ad blockers on the wrong side of the law – but the publishers trying to stop them, through their use of scripts to detect blocker usage. “That needs to end, and it’s my goal to stop it,” Hanff told Mobile Marketing, referring to his plans to file legal proceedings on the matter in various EU member states.

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UK Mobile Ad Spend Up £1bn Spend on mobile advertising in the UK rose by 62 per cent in 2015, hitting £2.63bn compared to last year’s figure of £1.62bn, according to figures from the IAB and PwC. Mobile accounted for 30.5 per cent of all digital advertising for the year, and drove the majority of growth, as digital spend rose 16.4 per cent – the highest increase since 2008.

Video and social were two areas where mobile performed especially well. Mobile spend on video doubled to £353m – 49.6 per cent of all digital ad dollars going on video – and social rose 41 per cent to £1.25bn, a mighty 71 per cent of overall social spend. The UK is leading the European digital ad market, according to another report from IAB and IHS Research, far outpacing other countries in the region last year. Germany came a distant second, with digital ad spend of €€5.8bn (£4.4bn), followed by France at €4.2bn.

JUNE 2016

NEWS REVIEW

Facebook Brings Out the Bots at F8 At its annual F8 developers’ conference, Facebook put Messenger at the forefront of its future plans. Among a number of smaller improvements and add-ons, the big news was the introduction of support for chat bots. Facebook launched an API that enables developers to create bots able to communicate with users via text, images and interactive ‘rich bubbles’ that can contain multiple calls-to-action, and a ‘bot engine’ from Wit.ai, the natural language processing firm it acquired last year. Brands

Microsoft Ducks Out of Smartphone Game with Nokia Sale After acquiring Nokia’s mobile business for€$5.4bn back in 2013, Microsoft sold off a large chunk of the company to FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Hon Hai/Foxconn Technology Group, for $350m. The deal included its feature phone business, access to the Nokia brand, and the company’s Hanoi manufacturing facility, Microsoft Mobile Vietnam – basically putting Microsoft out of the phones business entirely. The company will continue to produce Lumia handsets – the flagship smartphone line Microsoft acquired as part of the 2013 deal, which then dropped the Nokia brand in 2014 – but only under a contract manufacturing agreement with FIH. Through another deal made directly with what remains of the original Nokia business, FIH will hold exclusive rights to the Nokia brand until 2024, which it will use on phones and tablets sold through a newly-created business, HMD Global.

that have jumped on board so far include KLM, 1-800-Flowers, fashion retailer Spring and games franchise Call of Duty. It’s all part of Facebook’s move towards monetising the standalone Messenger app, but it also ties into a larger industry push towards chatbots. This announcement followed closely in the footsteps of Microsoft, which put the focus firmly on Cortana and Skype bots at its own developer conference, and messaging app Kik, which opened a bot store just weeks earlier.

Google Goes Wide at I/O In its keynote session at the annual I/O developer conference, Google went far beyond talking about the next version of its mobile OS, ‘Android N’, to show just how far the tech giant is stretching into areas outside of its core business. Leading the announcement was Google Daydream, the company’s new VR platform, building on top of its work with Cardboard. This will include a mode for Android that gives VR apps priority access to computing and graphics processors, a hardware certification program, a special version of the Play Store and VR versions of Google apps including YouTube and StreetView. Most importantly, though, Google will be working with third-party hardware manufacturers to produce a range of VR headsets and controllers, expected to arrive this autumn. As well as Google’s own Nexus handsets, Daydream will support devices from the likes of Samsung, HTC, Huawei and LG. The company is also pushing further into the smart home market, with the launch of Google Home, a voiceactivated “conversational assistant” device, and Google Assistant, the AI powering it. These products are being positioned as competitors to, first and foremost, Amazon’s Echo and Alexa. Unlike those offerings, though, Google’s platform is not open to third-party developers but the list of launch partners is impressive nonetheless, including Uber, Ticketmaster,

WhatsApp, OpenTable and Spotify. Assistant will also feature in new chat app Allo, where the AI can be brought into conversations to provide extra information on a topic and power a ‘smart reply’ feature that will automatically suggest responses without the user typing.

Over in the wearable space, Google showed off Android Wear 2.0, a streamlined version of the OS including support for direct network access to cloud services, meaning wearables needn’t require a connected handset to work. Finally, with Android Pay arriving in the UK just one day earlier, I/O also unveiled a partnership with Bank of America, enabling Pay users to tap their phones at ATMs to make cash withdrawals.

@mmmagtweets

ANALYSIS

JUNE 2016

Creative Thinking The ad world loves to talk about creativity. But what does it look like on mobile and is there much of it to see? David Murphy reports reativity is a subjective concept. What one person sees as creative may strike someone else as dull and uninspired. It’s an emotive one too: get a bunch of advertising creatives in a room to discuss creativity and the sparks are likely to fly as they advance the merits of some of the campaigns they have worked on. Think about creativity in TV or cinema advertising and you’re likely to recall memorable campaigns from the likes of Guinness, Hamlet, Honda, Milk Tray, Schweppes, British Airways or Coca-Cola perhaps. But what about mobile? What does creativity look like on a mobile device and indeed, does it even merit discussion, when advertising creatives have traditionally shown little interest in

ploughing their trade on the (significantly) smaller screen?

Native capabilities For Shan Handerson, director of mobile at Yahoo, what’s important is to forget about mobile’s so-called limitations and focus instead on what makes it unique. “The key to creativity on mobile is to focus on the native capabilities of the device and not start with the mindset of limitation,” he says. “It’s much more about the fact that this is an amazing, unique device. Couple that with an understanding of the user, where they are in the journey, and then think about the form factor and the native capabilities of the device - the camera, accelerometer, the microphone. Most of the best examples of creative mobile

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advertising use some if not all of those features to make it engaging and fun rather than overbearing or intrusive.” Henderson is not alone in pointing to the phone’s native capabilities – not to be confused with native advertising, one of the simplest, but currently most effective forms of advertising on mobile – as one of the key factors for creative and successful mobile advertising. Indeed, virtually everyone we spoke to for this piece picked up on the same point, often noting that you don’t have to go overboard with how you tap into those capabilities. In a campaign for Gymbox, for example, mobile ad firm Tabmo made the homesecreen look like a treadmill that the user could ‘run’ on using their fingers. Another campaign for HMV invited users to shake their phone to find

JUNE 2016

the perfect Christmas gift. Since the mobile campaign was the only one featuring some of the products involved, Tabmo UK MD Chris Childs says that both he and the client were able to see how successful the campaign was in driving sales uplift.

Learning curve Tej Rehki, AVP, global mobile product sales at Sizmek, believes that mobile advertising is on a learning curve as it tries to shake off the shackles of its desktop heritage. He says: “As the evolution of mobile occurred, the industry did not change its methodologies and mindsets from desktop, and what you saw was everyone using the same strategies and same approaches to mobile. As a result you saw complete failure – you saw very poor creative, poor execution, creative that didn’t work with mobile, didn’t use its native capabilities, just didn’t understand how to use what mobile gave it.” Then in 2015, an opportunity for change came when Google dropped support for Flash ads in its Chrome browser. “When Chrome decided to drop Flash people were saying that it would force everyone in desktop to go into HTML5,” says Rehki. “As a result you would think that creativity in mobile would get better, but what you actually saw was everyone trying to do responsive ads, which is that it’s going to work and look the same across all

“IF YOU WANT SOMEONE TO WATCH A 30-SECOND TV COMMERCIAL ON MOBILE, IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN” MATEVZ KLANJSEK, CELTRA environments, so it has that consistent look and feel. On one hand this is good but on the other, this idea of one size fits all, it doesn’t work. You need to understand the unique parameters of each device. So the combination of certain elements resulted

ANALYSIS

in everyone considering mobile creative as somewhat disgusting and not working very well, but it’s because people are not changing their mindsets and mentality around how to execute it.” Matevz Klanjsek, co-founder of Celtra agrees that mobile has wrongly been treated as an offspring of desktop, but says this is not that unusual in new media channels which, initially at least, tend to mimic what has gone before them. “When it comes to creativity in advertising, there are a couple of general rules you can follow to help you understand things,” he says. “The first is that historically, every new form of advertising develops from the previous form. The first TV ads were really just radio ads with a talking head. Then on desktop, you have video ads that look like modern-day TV ads and banners that still look very much like print ads from 50 years ago. Then on mobile, people have tried to squeeze the message and communicate with people using these old formats, borrowed from dekstop, in a medium that is alien to them. Consumption on mobile is totally different.” Consumption on mobile, in fact, is “opportunistic” as Klanjsek puts it. “It’s interruptive; it happens many times for very short amounts of time. So content for mobile has to be designed for this. You can’t just take content from TV and put it on mobile as a preroll, it does not work.

For its campaign for the Renault Twingo, Manning Gottlieb OMD used a game mechanic which resulted in more than 65,000 game plays

@mmmagtweets

ANALYSIS

JUNE 2016

People on mobile have a short attention span, not because they’re lazy, but because it’s an interruptive medium. We get a notification every four seconds on mobile so it interrupts the consumption of the content, so if you want someone to watch a 30-second TV commercial on mobile, it’s not going to happen.” Not only does the content need to be shorter. According to Klanjsek, the pacing has to change too. “TV commercials follow a familiar narrative arc,” he says. “They have a slow build-up to set the scene then the middle section, then the punchline. Do that on mobile devices and you’ll lose people during the build-up, the pacing needs to be much faster.” Despite the current state of affairs, however, Klanjsek says he is optimistic about the future, noting how TV advertising reinvented itself in the ‘70s when the talking head ads stopped working. “I think something very similar will happen to digital and mobile and there will be a revolution in creativity, because there will have to be,” he says. “The industry can’t continue as it is.”

Creative revolution InSkin is one of the companies trying to lead this creative revolution. Its PageSkin Edge ad unit was initially created to provide a non-intrusive branding format for the mobile web on tablets, and has

InSkin’s PageSkin Edge ad unit wraps around web content displayed on mobile devices

since been further developed specifically for smartphones. It wraps around the top and right-hand sides of webpage content. As the viewer scrolls through the content, the right-hand side element, with branding and calls to action, scrolls the page as well, and remains in view. Jeep, Mazda, Nike and Mercedes are among the advertisers who

Tablets offer a bigger canvas for mobile creatives to express themselves

have deployed the unit, which is currently integrated with 15 UK sites across 12 publishers, including Future, 1XL and the Daily Mail. InSkin chief commercial officer Steve Doyle says the idea behind the ad unit is to help brands achieve standout in a cluttered space. “Mobile is a challenge given the smaller screen, so what we try to do is to tread the line between advertising that is high impact and engaging, but is not intrusive,” he says. “It’s a fine line, and one that many advertisers cross in mobile.” At ad firm Imagine Mobile, head of creative Fabio Magalhaes says that far from seeing mobile as a smaller canvas on which to paint brand stories, he sees it as the biggest screen available to a creative. “Yes it’s limited physically to a certain size, but I like to think of it as the biggest screen I have because it’s so highly interactive,” he says. “You can touch and scroll in all directions so it’s really more like a window. So imagine that you have this bigger picture, then mobile allows you to use the screen as a window and focus on the small part of that bigger picture then use scroll, touch and swipe to see the larger image in separate parts. You can literally use as much space as you want, you just need to give the user a way to navigate it.” He adds that the tactile nature of mobile is one of the medium’s most appealing features. “People take the touchscreen for granted, but for me, it’s very powerful and

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emotional when you can touch the ad,” he says. “It creates an emotional bond between the audience and the brand.” Mobile specialists may be able to see beyond the apparent limitations of the smaller screen then, but what about the advertisers? According to Carlos Guedes, creative director at TouchCreate in Sydney, they are beginning to get mobile, more so in fact than the traditional agencies working on their TV and online campaigns. “Clients are much more keen to explore mobile than creative agencies,” he says. “Marketing directors are pretty savvy in that regard, they know mobile is the way to go. The creative agencies don’t think they are locked to the TV spot, but they are still locked to bigger scale projects where mobile is an afterthought.” Not that Guedes is complaining. “That’s helped our growth,” he continues. “Clients understand that they need mobile expertise, and this is what we offer. But I do see the creative agencies picking up on that in time as they realise there are a lot of creative capabilities to explore on mobile.”

Mobile complexities TouchCreate is not the only mobile specialist benefiting from understanding the complexities of mobile. At Wayve, founder and CEO Jamie Parker says there’s a direct correlation between the current lack of creativity in mobile, and the sheer amount of time and effort involved in

JUNE 2016

To promote the movie The Walk, TouchCreate came up with a mobile campaign that used the phone’s accelerometer to create a game in which the user walks on a tightrope, just like the main character in the movie

putting a mobile campaign together. “If you look at the transition from Flash to HTML5 to work on iPhones and tablets, we have seen creative agencies spending a lot more of their time and money on production rather than the creative side of things, which helps you to understand the

to get you to the 15th.” Tabmo’s Chris Childs tells a similar story, explaining how his company’s platform enables brands to easily adapt video assets created for TV or online, for use on mobile. The platform enables an advertiser to take a standard video creative,

ANALYSIS

ago, Barclays might have gone to an ad agency and said: ‘We need more people to have our current accounts, so we need you to create an ad to show how brilliant we and our current accounts are,’” he says. “Whereas what they actually did was to create Pingit, that allows you to pay money to your peers, and which has become one of their leading channels for acquisition for current accounts. It was a piece of utility that people found interesting and so they took action and that is the power of mobile. It’s a shift away from paying to get someone to look at my brand towards the delivery of a utility and a service as a way for people to get to know my brand.” So how much creativity is there in mobile, right now? The consensus seems to be, not an awful lot. At the same time, those closest to the coal face argue that there is plenty of scope to be creative on

“IMAGINE THAT YOU HAVE THIS BIGGER PICTURE, THEN MOBILE ALLOWS YOU TO USE THE SCREEN AS A WINDOW AND FOCUS ON THE SMALL PART OF THAT BIGGER PICTURE THEN USE SCROLL, TOUCH AND SWIPE TO SEE THE LARGER IMAGE IN SEPARATE PARTS” FABIO MAGALHAES, IMAGINE MOBILE place we are at, with pockets of really cool stuff but the lion’s share is still pretty basic because it’s really hard to do,” says Parker. This is the problem Wayve aims to solve. “If you look at the typical process of designing and building a mobile ad, the creative agency comes up with the idea and designs, it’s approved by the brand, the assets are created and sent through DoubleClick or Sizmek, and it’s all a bit of a headache, a complex process,” he says. “We try to make the process simple so you can spend more time on the creative. Take the design and video, upload it to our platform and it builds it for you. If you think about someone taking the lift in a skyscraper to get to the 20th floor, we do the heavy lifting

usually shot in landscape format, and reformat it for mobile using a portrait window that can be moved to the part of the video the advertiser wants to be seen, outputting the finished video in vertical format for display on mobile. “It makes it easy for users to adapt their videos for a fraction of the cost of having their creative agency adapt it or reshoot it,” says Childs. But there’s more to creativity on mobile than advertising of course. For Ilicco Elia, head of mobile at Digitas LBi, it can be about using mobile to deliver something useful to people. In this respect, he cites Barclays’s development of its mobile payment app, Pingit, as a prime example. “It’s easy to imagine that many years

Walkers’ Tweet to Eat campaign invited users to interact with a bus shelter to receive a free packet of crisps

mobile with 360° video, AR, VR, touch and all those other native capabilities. But the good stuff, they say, tends to get lost in a sea of mundane, performance-driven banner campaigns where clickthrough rates of a fraction of one per cent are hailed as a success. But as Celtra’s Klanjsek says, the industry has to change, and given the rapid rise of ad blocking, that change needs to happen fast. Going forward, creativity on mobile is not something agencies and advertisers should just aspire to. Arguably, it’s essential for the mobile advertising business to survive. MM

@mmmagtweets

ANALYSIS

JUNE 2016

Olympic Ambitions Rio 2016 will represent the first real Olympics of the mobile age, and a chance for organisers, teams and athletes to interact with consumers like never before. But are the Games ready for what mobile can offer?

016 will see the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games come to Rio de Janeiro, bringing athletes and fans from across the world, and turning the global eye of the media towards the country as teams from every nation compete for a chance of sporting glory. Around half of the world’s population is expected to tune in to watch the Games on television at some point, and of that audience, an estimated 85 per cent will be using an additional device while watching. The Games’ placement in Rio means that audiences in N. and S. America, western Europe and western Africa will all be able to watch live coverage. This huge live audience will transform social media into a real-time global conversation centred on the Games, with an estimated 15 per cent of fans planning to view or share Olympic

content on Twitter, 27 per cent on Snapchat and 79 per cent on Facebook. “Twitter’s event targeting offers a unique opportunity to reach users who are watching and engaging with the Olympics,” says Ruth Arber, director of solutions at Adapt.ly. “With about 80 per cent of social media users accessing social platforms through mobile devices, the Olympics is an opportune time to capture users when they’re dual-screening or on the go.”

Brand frustrations Traditionally, the Olympics has proved a frustrating time for many brands looking to associate themselves with such a large, globally-observed event. The International Olympics Committee (IOC) put in place and enforced strict rules about how brands could make use of Olympic imagery and

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Plans for the Rio 2016 Olympic park in Barra da Tijuca

JUNE 2016

wording, so that only partnered brands had access to the event. Even athletes found themselves limited in how they could discuss the Olympics. Rule 40, a controversial section of the Olympic Charter, prevented competitors and even coaches from making use of their image or name to advertise brands for a period around the Olympic Games. Rule 40 was a huge boon for those brands lucky enough to be official Olympic partners, as it guaranteed them more or less exclusive advertising coverage during the Games. But athletes had become increasingly frustrated with the policy, as it ruled out appearing as part of existing endorsement deals (often the only way for them to earn money from their participation in the Games), during their most high-profile period.

The rule was equally unpopular with brands which sponsored the athletes outside the Olympics. At the height of public awareness of sports, they had to remove all references to these figures and the Games from marketing materials or risk a fine for the brand, with athletes facing disqualification or even being stripped of medals they had won if they break the rules. During the 2012 Olympics, the London Organising Committeeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;brand policeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; drew criticism for their handling of Rule 40 among local small businesses, while athletes took to social media to draw attention to the situation, using hashtags like #Rule40 and #WeDemandChange to raise public knowledge of the rule that prevented them even from posting a photo of the shoes they ran in.

ANALYSIS

Olympic torches pass the flame en route from Athens to Rio

Some athletes have taken their protests further still. For the London 2012 Games, two-time Olympian Nick Symmonds sold ad space in the form of a tattoo on his left shoulder, which was purchased by ad

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2016

Olympian Nick Symmonds, who auctioned off ad space in the form of tattoos on his body

celebrations, Rule 40 increasingly felt like a relic of another time. Last year, the IOC finally listened to the comments of both athletes and brands, and loosened the restrictions on how athletes could interact with brands during the Games. “Social media is the next great frontier for sports sponsorships,” says Rob Mason, managing director of IMG Consulting. “But sports rights-holders need to understand their social media value, and sponsors need to know what they want from it.”

Complex rules

agency Hanson Dodge Creative for $11,000 (£7,650). He repeated the same stunt this year in advance of the Rio Games, selling his right shoulder to T-Mobile CEO John Legere for $21,800. “I want to raise awareness about the fact that our Olympians don’t get paid a single dollar from the IOC to compete,” says Symmonds. “This current model, that has all of the money passing through IOC and absolutely none of it going to the athletes, is unacceptable.” In the age of social media, where athletes will tweet their training regimes, Instagram their victories and Vine their

There are still complex rules in place, most notably that campaigns featuring Olympic athletes had to begin no later than 27 March this year and run continuously in order to qualify, but the relaxation of Rule 40 means that more companies than ever can seize upon the Olympics as a way to strengthen their brand and engage consumers. “We have a huge roster of Olympic athletes that are going to tell their ‘Rule Yourself’ stories through digital and social,” says Adrienne Lofton, senior vice president of global brand marketing at sports apparel brand Under Armour, speaking about the company’s current campaign. “We plan to honour them before they go into the games, during the games and after. “It allows us to be part of the conversation when it is hot and when that sport, or that win, is most relevant. We are happy to see the relaxing of that rule and we are going to take advantage of it.”

Under Armour’s campaign will have a 50/50 media mix between television and digital, using social media to reach second-screening viewers during the Olympics and enabling the athletes it has deals with, which include swimmer Michael Phelps, football star Memphis Depay and the US gymnastics team, to interact with consumers in a more intimate, engaging way. “We are going to use social and digital as a lever that we have not really maximised, quite frankly, in the past,” says Lofton. “Because we know that is when we can have our most authentic one-to-one dialogue with athletes all over the world.”

Periscope’s eye view The spread of athlete-supported brand campaigns to social media isn’t the only way mobile will impact on the Rio Olympics. Perhaps the biggest change coming to the Games is the rise of mobile live-streaming technology. At London 2012, Snapchat was barely a year old and only just starting to make waves in the mobile community. For Rio 2016, consumers looking to access photos and footage from the Games will be able to choose from Snapchat, Periscope, Meerkat, Facebook Live and many more content-sharing platforms. These apps and services will be able to circumvent traditional forms of coverage, potentially robbing sponsors and advertisers of viewers, while presenting a more unfiltered, ground-level version of the atmosphere at the Games.

AMBUSHING THE OLYMPICS

any sporting events are the target of so-called ‘ambush marketing’ – where brands which are not official sponsors attempt to capitalise on the public interest – and the Olympics is obviously no exception to this. While the relaxation of Rule 40 enables non-partner brands to use the name and image of athletes during the Games, this change is aimed at enabling long-term sponsors to take advantage of the higher profile that the Olympics generate, not at allowing every company with a tenuous sports connection to stick an Olympic logo onto their Twitter icon. Specific images and words associated with the Games, including “Rio 2016”, “Olympic” and the Olympic symbol of five rings are still limited to official partner brands alone, and other companies cannot imply any connection to the

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Games or even offer tickets as a prize for a promotion. During the London 2012 Olympics, special legislation was brought in to make these rules even more stringent, outlawing the combination of sporting images with pictures of London, generic medals or even international flags. These rules no longer apply, but brands should still be wary of any attempts they make to take advantage of Rio 2016. “If you are planning an international campaign, general anti-ambush or unfair competition laws may prevent this sort of generic association,” says Alex Kelham, managing associate and head of the Sports Group at law firm Lewis Silkin LLP. “Indeed, laws similar to the London 2012 ‘association right’ are being introduced in Brazil for the Games. There certainly isn’t carte-blanche to ambush the Rio 2016 Games.”

JUNE 2016

ANALYSIS

A Brazilian celebrates Rio being named as the host city in 2009

Live-streaming apps have been seen as a threat to exclusive sports events since their creation. Sporting bodies have taken a variety of approaches to counteract the increase in the number of people broadcasting footage, the rights to which have been sold at high prices to television networks. Some sporting teams have even taken to hosting their own live-streams in an effort to retain at least some form of control and maintain coverage for sponsors. “The International Olympic Committee probably ranks Periscope somewhere

enables users to stream and watch in landscape mode, and has integrated streaming direct from drones – another new technology that may well feature at Rio 2016, despite the best efforts of the organisers. “Twitter wasn’t built for sports media – but as it turned out, the two were made for one another,” says sports writer Colin Anderle. “The former brought unfiltered access to the latter to all, without the crap you had to wade through to get there in the first place. Meerkat and Periscope are going to

“SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE NEXT GREAT FRONTIER FOR SPORTS SPONSORSHIPS” Rob Mason, IMG Consulting between an ISIS attack and double toilet installations on its list of major threats to the Rio Games,” says David Berkowitz, chief marketing officer of creative and technology agency MRY, referring to photos that emerged of cubicles featuring two toilets, with no partition, at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. “If too much good footage is available via unauthorised video streaming, that eats into broadcasters’ ad revenue.” As tech platforms continue to make improvements and mobile technology advances to capturing footage in 4K HD, live-streaming services come to represent more and more of a threat to the existing sports broadcast model. Periscope now

do the exact same thing for video media. Together, they are going to flood the antiquated top-down system with access, and the industry will just either adapt to this or perish.” Faced with such dire warnings, the sports broadcasting market is indeed adapting. Earlier this year, American broadcaster NBC placed GoPro cameras around Churchill Downs for its coverage of the Kentucky Derby, enabling fans to stream the feeds through linked Twitter and Periscope accounts. For the Olympics, the broadcaster has gone one step further and agreed to share video of the Games for the first time in history. NBC, which is owned by Comcast,

has signed a deal with Snapchat that will see the video messaging service set up a dedicated channel for the Games. Buzzfeed will curate short clips from the competition, along with behind-thescenes content, for a Discover channel on the app, while Snapchat will create daily Stories using content provided by NBC, along with on-the-spot footage of athletes and sports fans. “We have never allowed the distribution of any game highlights off NBC’s own platforms,” says Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics. “But [Snapchat] really effectively reaches a very important demographic in the United States, and is very important to our efforts to assemble the large, massive audience that will show up to watch the Olympic Games.” What does this all mean for marketers hoping to tap into the Olympics on mobile? Well, thanks to social media and live-streaming, there will be more channels than ever where consumers are hoping to access content related to the Games. While there are still plenty of rules and guidelines governing how brands can associate themselves with the event or athletes who are competing, the omnipresent nature of mobile technology is forcing the Games and those associated with them to evolve like never before. While traditional organisations like the IOC may struggle to adapt to the ways mobile is transforming the consumption of the Olympics, demand from both consumers and brands means that this is set to be the most mobilefriendly Olympics ever. MM

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COMMENT

AUGUST 2015

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COMMENT

Port in a storm Amir Malik, director of programmatic at Trinity Mirror Solutions, looks at the options for news publishers trying to navigate the waves of digital evolution ews publishers are having a tough time with digital. This struggle is elucidated by a few simple home truths about technology’s evolution, both hardware- and software-driven. Compounding this struggle is the shift in content distribution. Unless you’ve been living on the moon for the past three years, you will have heard of programmatic, which is a macroeconomic shift in how digital media is bought by advertisers. Programmatic is highly profitable and efficient for ad agencies, tracing its origins back to ad networks who skinned themselves as buyer-agnostic tech companies to permeate publishers as a tier 2, or backfill, monetisation solution. However, global agencies soon realised this platform could be exploited, and have harnessed the power of automation and data-driven marketing. Investment across digital inventory via programmatic is rocketing; this real-time, userspecific buying has democratised digital inventory. Within this democratisation, agencies are essentially setting their own prices as investment isn’t simply inventory-driven, but audience-driven, where the buyer simply wants to know their ad is in-view and targeting a human who is relevant to their brand.

Revenue wounds Hunting cookies and device IDs like piranhas, trading desks are often operated by low-cost grads with millions of dollars at their disposal, who seem to drive more ROI for an advertiser than a traditional media booking. But Header Bidding, Programmatic Guaranteed, etc. are plasters over gaping revenue wounds, and none are sufficient in replacing the loss of high-yielding, direct agency investment. As a result, publishers are churning out the ‘re’, namely reorgs and redundancies.

To add to the problems, technology is changing the way we digest media. The question of who controls the internet boils down to one reality, uttered by the late founder of Reddit, Aaron Swartz: “The people who control the internet are those who control the distribution of content.” Without jumping into the abyss of ‘dark social’, publishers ostensibly have two problems right now - Google and Facebook. Frenemies who innovate in the digital space faster than anybody else, and by virtue of process-laden legacy media businesses, bound by short term realities who thus forfeit long term commitments, these two companies have taken the mantle of serious media investment. WPP for instance invested $3.5bn (£2.4bn) in Google in 2015, and $950m in Facebook. But the scale of these mega-publishers transcends advertising. With audiences in the billions, their growth has impacted the digital ecosystem. The independent ‘web’ server, the browser, will soon be an ancestor of content distribution as the Android and iOS platforms aggregate apps and the mobile web. Facebook and Google are tampering with the very fabric of web infrastructure and monopolising our front-end experience of the internet. The commercial operating models of Facebook, Google, and the like will continue to suck revenues away from content owners as their work is funnelled into these landscapes.

We are hitting a centralised phase of the world wide web. News publishers are trapped in a cycle of failure, tumbling through this period of change, looking for any port in a storm. For publishers, working with these mega-publishers and walled gardens is not merely a choice any more, it’s a must. Concurrent strategies with this compromise must be devised to survive this shift and disruption. The walled gardens invest in their own technology, such as Google’s DoubleClick and Facebook’s Atlas, whereas publishers tend to spin the wheel of fortune on ad tech, their buying decisions often precipitated by a jolly, without real, empirical-based judgments.

Brand-safe environments Building or acquiring technology is not an easy feat, but alliances with independent or merely publisher-focused technologies and innovations could be the right strategy. Publishers who can surface the value of their data as well as emphasising their brand-safe environments will reap the rewards of this concentration. Data is the colostrum of programmatic, and unless publishers strive to own, understand and distribute their first-party data, this opportunity will be swallowed up by the walled gardens and it will be too late to shift the needle. Quantifying the ROI on data investment is difficult on a spreadsheet but in motion, it arms media owners for the pitch against these walled gardens. Facebook has access to 20 per cent of UK mobile users, but accounts for 80 per cent of mobile agency spend in some instances, which reveals the necessity of data-led sales. Alas, where publisher content traverses will be difficult to control, but harvesting the data of their users could be a serious port of call to remain afloat in the ever changing tides of digital. MM

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COVER STORY

JUNE 2016

Scaling Up

David Murphy talks to Andy Ashley, marketing director Europe and APAC at Digital Element, about the importance of accurate location data in targeting mobile users at scale

he days of searching for decent wi-fi connectivity are, thankfully, a thing of the past. Walk out of your house or your office and you’re likely to find good, usually free wi-fi in any number of cafes, bars, pubs, restaurants, hotels, shops, trains and train stations, airports and many other public spaces. So much so that some estimates suggest that on a typical day, as much as 80 per cent of mobile traffic is connected over wi-fi. This is good news for companies looking to advertise on mobile, as the more robust wi-fi connectivity allows them to serve up richer advertising content, including images, videos and even augmented reality content, safe in the knowledge that the experience of viewing it on a mobile device while out and about will be a good one. Not something that can always be said when dealing with cellular connectivity. “Targeting mobile users over wi-fi connections enables us to help our clients reach those users at scale,” says Andy Ashley, marketing director Europe and APAC at Digital Element. The company pioneered IP geolocation and has been helping brands

geotarget content and advertising for the past 17 years. It remains the only IP data supplier that is accredited by the Media Rating Council. “There are a lot of other technologies that can give you accurate IP geolocation to within a few feet, but they usually need some sort of app, and require the user to opt in, something which a very small proportion of people choose to do,” says Ashley. “IP geolocation on the other hand enables the targeting of mobile users without the need for opt in, because we do not collect any personally identifiable information about the user.”

Location accuracy The notion of accuracy is very important to the company’s offering, Ashley says. “We believe we are much more accurate than anyone else out there. Our trace-routing technology maps out the world’s IP space and supplements it with data from partners. Most other platforms tend to repackage registry information data that is publicly available. The problem with this is that when an Internet Service Provider allocates a block of IP addresses, it may or may not register the location of the IP address, and even if does, if often does not have to keep them up to date. A lot of our competitor’s data is therefore inherently

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inaccurate and has patchy global coverage. “Our IP solution, NetAcuity Pulse, adds a whole new dimension to IP geotargeting. It builds on the previous iterations of our IP data solutions by incorporating data from mobile devices, billions of real-time data signals and wi-fi connection points. NetAcuity Pulse significantly expands the global coverage and reach for postcode level targeting within cities and neighbourhoods, offering more seen IPs at a hyperlocal level than any other supplier.’’ Brands use Digital Element’s accredited IP data for a variety of use cases. Most but not all of these are marketing-focused, but each delivers relevant content at the moment when it most matters. NetAcuity is heavily used for advertising and analytics platforms. “Advertising technology companies, Data Management Platforms and analytics companies use our data in various ways,” says Ashley. “Ad technology companies use it for standalone geotargeting and to develop targeting profiles to allow for instant bidding and the

SPONSORED FEATURE

serving of highly relevant advertising. For platforms like Advertising.com, Crimtan, Teads.tv, Turn, Weborama, Webtrekk, Omniture, Adobe Analytics and WebTrends, it’s a fundamental part of their offering. Analytics companies use IP data to identify patterns of activity among their customers to identify other consumers with similar traits, for example.” In the UK, programmatic ad firm Crimtan, one of Digital Element’s partners, uses the tech to target advertising more precisely for its clients. In one campaign, for example, Crimtan used Digital Element’s NetAcuity Edge platform to carry out a study of potential visitors for the owner of seven holiday parks situated in the south west of England. The results showed that users most likely to visit the company’s sites were located south west of a line drawn from Chester to Canterbury, excluding greater London, as well as in Wales and North Wales. This new insight empowered the holiday parks to understand and target the specific areas that would benefit from local advertising, leading to greater efficiency and improved ROI. Online clothes retailers use Digital Element’s IP geolocation solution, NetAcuity, to show very specific looks to customers in different regions. So for example a consumer in Paris could see an ad or website range that is specific to that city, compared to a different ad shown to someone in Marseilles, tapping into the prevailing mood and fashion trends within each city. As well as using location to serve content in the right language and price. As previously noted, NetAcuity is the only IP solution provider that

can provide true postcode targeting. Retailers often use the technology to automatically show stores in close proximity to the users. This not only removes the need for fiddly and unnecessary postcode checkers, it allows the targeting of local promotions, in real time, increasing engagement and conversions.

Aligning real world events with IP geolocation data IP geolocation can also be combined with other “real world’’ events such as weather. For example, a clothing retailer can promote warmer clothing when a cold front moves into a certain area, aligning content and ad targeting to real world events. Away from the marketing arena, several well-known broadcasters, including CNN, Channel 5 and many other major Over The Top service providers, use the

COVER STORY

platform to manage geographical rights. The solution enables the broadcasters to prevent users accessing their content from countries where they don’t have the rights to distribute it, even if the user is accessing via a VPN (Virtual Private Network) or some other proxy service. Finally, IP intelligence can also be used to help detect and prevent online fraud. By identifying how visitors connect, through say a proxy or VPN, suspicious traffic can be identified and acted upon. The good news is that this stuff works. Advertising.com saw a 700 per cent increase in localised advertising ROI in its first year of operation. Tapad has also seen big improvements in clickthrough rates (CTRs) for its clients, across multiple devices, including an 11 per cent lift in CTR for geotargeted media in the desktop environment; an 8 per cent lift in CTR for geotargeted media in the mobile environment; and a 7 per cent lift in CTR for geotargeted media in the tablet environment. So what does the future hold? “One of the key things for us will be cross-platform targeting, helping to deliver carefully crafted and contextually relevant customer journeys” says Ashley. “We are likely to see a lot more mobile marketing across devices, with the ability to identify the same user across each device. “This is still in its infancy, but with the advent of internet-connected TVs, we believe there will be a much bigger opportunity for cross-device targeting and a more joined-up customer journey. Brands want it, and I think when consumers see how it works, they will like it too.” MM

NetAcuity enables brands to target consumers at true postcode level on mobile devices

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2016

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JUNE 2016

ANALYSIS

Social standing Do you know your Canvases from your Carousels? With the range of social ad units always growing, we round up the key ad formats on offer from four of the biggest names in social: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest>>

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ANALYSIS

Facebook “f ” Logo

JUNE 2016

FACEBOOK

CMYK / .eps

Facebook “f ” Logo

CMYK / .eps

Despite having featured ads since its very earliest days, when Facebook came to file for its IPO in 2012, it was not making any money from mobile. In spite of about half of its traffic coming from mobile at the time, Facebook’s ad offering was still largely tied up in the desktop site’s sidebar, which wasn’t present on mobile. In the intervening years, that has changed almost completely, with a shift in focus to ads within the newsfeed, in a variety of forms that only continues to grow. It’s worked – as of Q1 2016, mobile now accounts for 82 per cent of all Facebook’s ad revenues.

Canvas

A full-screen mobile format intended to foreground quality creative, canvas ads can combine video, still images, text and call-to-action buttons, with swipe, tilt and zoom navigation. They’re also designed to be faster, promising 10x the loading speed of the mobile web.

360

These spherical video ads can be explored by the user dragging with their finger or tilting the handset to show the scene from a variety of angles as it plays. The content has to be filmed with special 360° camera rigs, such as the one Facebook launched at its F8 event in April.

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JUNE 2016

Carousel

Product

ANALYSIS

The carousel format includes between two and five images or videos – or both – arranged horizontally for the user to swipe through. Each segment can feature its own short headline and call-to-action button.

Product ads offer a way of promoting multiple products in a single unit. Merchants are able to upload their entire catalogue and automatically target different products, or combinations of products, to users based on their interests. This can be tied to stock in order to stop advertising something once it’s sold out.

Lead

Lead ads promise to simplify the sign-up process – from subscribing to a newsletter to requesting a quote – on mobile. When clicked, the ads open a form, which is automatically populated with contact information taken from the user’s Facebook profile, though advertisers can also choose to add their own customisable fields.

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2016

TWITTER Promoted Tweets The first ad product it ever launched, back in April 2010, the promoted tweet is the core building block of Twitter’s ad offering. Appearing like any other tweet from the brand’s account, with an added ‘Promoted’ label, these will appear in the timelines of users, even if they don’t follow the brand being promoted. They also show up in search results and even on the profile pages of relevant Twitter users, with targeting based on signals including who the user follows and which tweets they interact with. Since 2010, a wide variety of promoted tweet formats have launched – you can see a selection of them below.

Conversational

Featuring a callto-action button, conversational ads give users a pre-written tweet with the brand’s chosen message, along with the original ad creative, which they can personalise or post as-is to their followers. They’ll then automatically receive a thank you message for engaging with the brand.

App Install

Starting in 2013, Twitter introduced a range of ‘card’ formats, which enable more complex functionality within promoted tweets. Among these is the app install card, which can be used to directly download an app, along with an install notification on Twitter itself once it’s done.

Buy Now Only available on Twitter’s apps in the US, these ads not only advertise products, but can be used to directly buy them within the tweet through a ‘Buy’ button which leads to a short purchase process.

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Twitter Offers Using technology from Twitter’s acquisition of CardSpring, users can add an offer to their credit or debit card to be redeemed in-store, enabling advertisers to close the loop on coupon campaigns.

JUNE 2016

Promoted Video

Promoted Trends

Promoted Accounts

ANALYSIS

Video ads are a relatively new addition to Twitter, having launched in August 2014. They work more or less the same as promoted tweets, appearing in users’ timelines. At launch, the user had to manually choose to play the video, but in June 2015,

Twitter changed all video, Vine and GIF content – organic and sponsored alike – to autoplay, without sound, whenever the user scrolls past. Promoted video is charged on a cost-perview basis – advertisers only pay for ads which have played for three seconds, with 100 per cent of the video in view.

Advertisers are able to sponsor a hashtag on a day-by-day basis that will then appear at the top of the Trending Topics list (marked, of course, with a ‘Promoted’ tag), and occasionally in users’ timelines. The trend can either be related to current events, like the App

Store’s sponsorship of #InspiringWomen on International Women’s Day, or more openly promotional, like Samsung’s #GalaxyS7isHere. When users click through to that trend, a promoted tweet from the advertiser will be displayed at the top of the list, though the rest of the tweets will be organic search results, presented unfiltered, as the user would see on any other trend.

As the name suggests, these are Twitter accounts that users don’t currently follow, targeted based on what other accounts they already follow, which are then displayed in various locations in order to help garner more followers. Initially only available on desktop, promoted accounts came to

mobile in 2013 after they were expanded from the ‘Who to follow’ sidebar section – a bit of real estate that’s not available to either the mobile site or app – into users’ timelines, similar to a promoted tweet, and later to search results. Promoted accounts are charged on a per-follow basis, meaning advertisers don’t pay for accounts which users see but don’t engage with.

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2016

INSTAGRAM Sponsored Image/Video Instagram first launched its ad offering in November 2013, built entirely around sponsored image posts – identical to any other Instagram post, except for a ‘Sponsored’ tag – with 15-second video ads following the next year. While the image format has remained more or less static, video ads have seen their maximum length increased twice since, now standing at 60 seconds. Building on this foundation, Instagram has since launched a variety of other mobilefirst products, as its ad offering opened up across the globe.

Dynamic Ads

Instagram’s most recent launch, dynamic ads are only shown to users who have previously browsed the advertiser’s site or app. The ads showcase products similar to those the customer were looking at, with a ‘shop now’ button linking directly to the product listing.

Marquee

Pitched as a premium ad product, marquee promises to let advertisers “own a moment”. It offers a prominent one-day placement for an image or video ad that can be seen by users up to three times a day, designed specifically for product launches or entertainment releases.

Carousel

Direct Response As with the Facebook format of the same name, carousel brings together a number of images and videos which the user can swipe between, along with a link to the advertiser’s website.

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These actionorientated ads feature a call-toaction button, with advertisers choosing between seven objectives including ‘book now’, ‘sign up’, ‘contact us’ and ‘download’

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ANALYSIS

PINTEREST Standard Pin Pinterest’s ad offering is still fairly nascent, having first launched in the US at the start of the year and expanded to its second market, the UK, in April. As a result, its ‘pin’ ad formats are still fairly limited, and much of the functionality that’s available for organic pins – like video, GIFs, buyable product listings – currently isn’t available to advertisers, though that may well change in the future.

Rich Pins

A broad umbrella covering any and all posts that go beyond Pinterest’s basic image-and-text posts, rich pins can include recipes, articles or location-based content (right). It also includes some formats, such as app listings, that aren’t currently available to advertisers.

Cinematic Pins

Featuring GIF-style looping animations, these pins come to life as the user scrolls past. The speed and direction of the animation can be controlled by scrolling: a swipe up or down will make it play backwards or forwards, stopping will show a static image.

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2016

CHATBOT Suddenly, everyone seems to be chatting about bots. But what exactly are they, where has all the buzz come from, and whereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the technology headed? Alex Spencer explains all

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JUNE 2016

ust a year ago, ‘bot’ was for the most part a dirty word in this industry. It conjured up images of fake Twitter accounts sending endless spam, but over the past few months, bots have undergone something of a renaissance. They’re grabbing headlines and, depending on who you listen to, might just be the new apps. But where do they come from? Well, like most apparently new ideas in tech (see also: virtual reality, wearables) bots have actually been around for years. At the turn of the millennium, when AIM and MSN were the messaging services du jour, there was SmarterChild. Like modern bots, it appeared among the rest of users’ contacts and would respond to users’ questions with text-based answers. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve used Siri, Cortana, Alexa or Google Now. The only real difference with these personal assistant apps is that they’re voice-controlled rather than text-based and, vitally, are built into separate apps or entire operating systems rather than contained within an existing messaging app. Depending on the service, you can access the bots by adding them as you would any other contact, or by

downloading from an app-style storefront.

Why now? Here in 2016, the event that pushed bots back into the spotlight wasn’t too flattering for the technology. In March, Microsoft released ‘Tay’, a Twitter chatbot intended to learn from its interactions with users. Within 18 hours, however, the bot had been taken offline due to posting a variety

ANALYSIS

and 1-800-Flowers plus publishers CNN and The Wall Street Journal, with Bank of America, Great Western Railway, eBay and Burger King slated for the next few months. H&M and Sephora are leading the charge for fashion brands on Kik’s bot store, while Taco Bell recently launched a bot for workplace chat service Slack. Given that most bots are just a programmed set of text responses to user

“DON’T EXPECT CHATBOTS TO STEAL ANY JOBS FROM REAL PEOPLE – BUT IT’S POSSIBLE THAT THEY’RE PLOTTING TO TAKE OVER THE ROLE OF APPS” of racist, sexist and otherwise offensive responses to tweets. Slightly more positively, the following month saw three major launches within the space of less than two weeks. This began with Microsoft’s Build conference, where CEO Satya Nadella emphasised the company’s focus on what it calls ‘conversations as a platform’, unveiling the Cortana Intelligence Suite for its Windows AI assistant and a platform for creating Skype chatbots which can communicate not only via text, but also voice and even video animations. In early April, messaging app Kik opened its own bot store, and less than a week later Facebook joined the party with the announcement of its Messenger Platform at the F8 event. Its Send/Receive API is intended to be the basis of a variety of bots capable of rich interactions – presumably as part of the company’s attempts to monetise the Messenger app. Brands are already jumping on board with these launches. Facebook’s platform currently has offerings from brands KLM

inputs, they can cover an incredibly broad range of simple tasks, from searching the web (as with Skype’s Bing offerings) to offering weather updates (like Facebook Messenger’s Poncho or Kik’s Weather Channel bots). They can also process orders (Taco Bell’s Tacobot for Slack) or present basic chooseyour-own-adventure text games (Sequel Stories, on Facebook Messenger). Even before the launch of these platforms, movie brands were adopting chat bots that imitate characters in order to reach potential viewers. Universal Studios’ Unfriended, a horror film about social media bullying, got its own bot on Facebook Messenger, while visitors to last year’s SXSW swiping for a date may have encountered Ava, the robotic protagonist of sci-fi movie Ex Machina, on Tinder.

Customer service Possibly the simplest and most interesting possibility for brands right now, though, lies in CRM. Basic customer service tasks can be automated through a bot, leaving actual human staff more time to deal with higher-level queries. As it stands, don’t expect chatbots to steal any jobs from real people – they’re not that intelligent yet – but it’s possible that they’re plotting to take over the role of apps.

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2015

Kik launched its Bot Store in April as an attempt to differentiate the messaging app from its competitors, with chatbots from H&M, The Weather Channel and Funny or Die

The new apps?

Facebook’s bots can be found through searching, or by using the app to scan the relevant ‘Messenger Codes’

When it launched its bot store, Kik’s announcement specifically referenced a decline in app downloads as part of its reasoning. The thinking is, that as people use fewer and fewer apps, it’s an opportunity for the successful apps – which, outside of games, basically means social and messaging services – to make a landgrab and dominate even more of users’ time by offering more functionality. This is similar to what Facebook is attempting elsewhere with its Instant Articles – bringing functionality that has traditionally been housed on the wider web into its own app, so users have fewer reasons to leave. “There’s nothing to download, no new registration required, and you can use an interface you’re already familiar with: chat,” as Kik puts it. It’s worth remembering, though, that the functionality they can offer is currently quite limited. In most cases, there isn’t much more to them than the automated switchboards you get when calling customer service centres. As it stands, bots like Microsoft’s Tay

are actually the exception to the rule. Tay was developed to give the impression of being a real teenage girl and have real conversations with users based on what the AI learned, rather than the calland-response of most bots launched on Facebook Messenger and the like. A more typical example is Fandango’s forthcoming Messenger bot, showcased at F8. It offers users access to movie information, trailers, cinema locations and screening times, as well as linking to a transactional site – but these are all tasks that can currently be handled by a website. Expecting technological complexity for the sake of it, though, is rather missing the point. It’s easy to hear terms like ‘bot’ and ‘AI’ and get caught up in sci-fi dreams of something like Her, but that isn’t really the aim of Facebook, Microsoft and the rest. Bots are a way of providing basic services you can already get elsewhere, but those services under the umbrella of a single app. It sounds simple, and it is. But as a saturated market means it becomes harder and harder for new apps to find audiences, that might be vitally important.” MM

As well as traditional text-based chat bots, Skype plans to introduce ‘video bots’ which generate 3D animations for the user to interact with

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2016

Celebrating Excellence in Mobile Marketing

OPEN FOR ENTRIES ENTRY DEADLINE: 22 JULY www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/awards

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ANALYSIS

Pizza perfection Adela Blackford, marketing manager at Rakuten Display, explains how Papa John’s drives sales through hyper-local targeting

here are 7.4 connected devices in the average UK household, so we are seeing an increasingly complex consumer journey, and brands must ensure they are present across all touchpoints and devices. One key mobile strategy marketers are using is hyper-local targeting. It enables brands to deliver the right message at the right time by pinpointing consumers’ locations through their mobile devices and matching that information with customer profiles to identify and communicate to a highly targeted audience.

mobile and cross-device strategy: 57 per cent of ads served on a smartphone saw conversions on a smartphone. We also saw a strong purchasing trend between smartphone and desktop, rather than smartphone to tablet. The cross-device element not only created a seamless brand experience for the customer, but boosted brand affinity with those that were most receptive to the marketing message.

An important component to the strategy was identifying where the most engaged and relevant target audience would be. Rakuten Display used a prospecting solution to target consumers browsing, sports, food, online TV guides and other relevant websites on mobile. We also exercised a retargeting solution using a combination of IP addresses and Yorkshire Metro classifications to give us pin-point accuracy. Thanks to our

What’s next?

Hyper-local in practice One brand that harnesses hyper-local targeting is Papa John’s, the third largest pizza delivery company in the world. The brand partnered with Rakuten Display to implement a mobile and cross-device strategy solution to drive orders to its newly-opened store in York, using location-based targeting. Given that over 50 per cent of Papa John’s pizzas in the UK are ordered from a customer’s desktop or mobile device, Rakuten Display’s principal objective was to raise brand awareness and drive sales through digital devices. Hyper-local targeting enabled us to granularly target consumers in a three-mile radius in realtime (the delivery distance of the store). This allowed us to efficiently engage with the right audience for Papa John’s in the right context. We knew that desktop sales were a key part of Papa John’s business and so layering a cross-device campaign on top of the hyper-local mobile campaign meant we would be able to capture the different stages of the purchase journey across devices, enabling us to cast a tight net over the geo-fenced area in York.

machine-learning technology, we were also able to retarget engaged consumers across screens to identify the most opportune moments to serve ads to them.

Results Together, Rakuten Display and Papa John’s created a strong geo-targeting campaign with programmatic mobile as the backbone, using geographic, contextual smart targeting and effective utilisation of multiple data points. Strong results were achieved based on the granularity of the campaign, driving a solid £2:1 return on ad spend for mobileonly targeting and an impressive £22:1 return on investment on the cross-device campaign. We gathered considerable insight supporting the success of a

Papa John’s continues to pave the way through its innovative digital marketing strategies. The pizza delivery giant has achieved success with Rakuten Display on its latest promotional messaging push, where mobile and cross-device campaigns contributed to 24 per cent in total revenue from its full-funnel display strategy, and delivered a 6 per cent higher AOV rate compared to their desktop average. Hyper-local and cross-device targeting are essential strategies for targeting on-the-go consumers in an increasingly digital world. eMarketer predicts 76 per cent of mobile display will be traded programmatically this year and it’s easy to understand why; being able to be where your consumers are, gauge consumer behaviour and deliver bespoke messaging in real-time is an incredibly powerful tool that marketers now have at their disposal. However, marketers must appreciate that it’s not all automatic success. Calibrating KPIs will set expectations and allow for continual campaign optimisation, testing and analysis to be carried out to meet marketing goals. Hyper-local is just one weapon in the mobile armoury; expect to continue to see mobile capabilities playing a pivotal role in marketing strategy. For more information, head to: www.rakutenmarketing.co.uk/display MM

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ANALYSIS

See clearly. Spend better Ewan Darby, managing director, EMEA, at CAKE, considers the power of optimisation in mobile performance campaigns arketers have long been aware of the value of mobile in performance marketing, as it rapidly evolved from its embryonic status to dominate strategic planning. As it evolved, so too did the complexity in understanding consumer paths, media influence and the alchemy of multidevice attribution. Necessity being the mother of invention, a wealth of analytics capabilities appeared to fill the void created when the new world of mobile performance evolved. Each of them answered some of the questions posed from the big data that marketers had to understand to get the answers to questions of influence,

they can effectively optimise activity and maximise budgets. App-centric analytics are essential for reporting consumer behaviour from install to engagement and deletion; critical insight needed to improve the core app product for enhanced consumer engagement, the value of free/freemium/ premium business models and product life cycle and development. In mobile, as for all performance marketing, understanding the trafficconversion-monetisation flow of consumer sales lies at the heart of the discipline. The most successful performance networks have excellent insights to drive decision-making, a function that CAKE has pioneered and developed for the mobile era. When marketers have real-time data to action changes, trends are spotted immediately, traffic is monetised more quickly and the customer experience is greatly The sophisticated CAKE interface for mobile tracking and optimisation enhanced resulting in efficiency, value and, of course, attribution. higher revenues per engagement. Even in the brave new world of At CAKE, we provide clients with mobile performance marketing there is market-leading technology to manage and complexity, requiring specialist solutions. optimise mobile performance marketing Companies like Quantcast and Google campaigns. We see first hand what clients provide analytics for mobile web with need of their mobile platforms and the crossover to in-app where there is now a insight required to inform their strategies. slew of tracking available. The majority We’ve developed a sophisticated SDK of in-app analytics target app developers for optimum campaign management, – the tools of their trade – but leave and partnered with Kochava for even advertisers and their marketing teams greater operational flexibility so that app without sufficient attribution insight integrations can be as comprehensive as and therefore the ingredients by which they are broad-reaching.

Market demands evolve and drive CAKE’s development strategy to meet our clients’ needs both now and in the future. An excellent example is the mobile deeplinking functionality, recently upgraded from the beta version we markettested earlier this year. The underlying architecture behind this release is engineered for clients to integrate into their campaigns and gives publishers the flexibility to deep-link to campaigns where they see the most value and return. The key word for CAKE is “optimise”. If you meet us at a trade show, you will see our stand that displays the “See Clearly. Spend Better” branding, the mantra with which we have become synonymous. Our platform provides full visibility to the conversion funnel in real-time reporting to both publishers and advertisers and means valuable traffic (and its increasing cost) may be immediately adjusted and enhanced for improved conversion rates and data quality for all parties. Mobile deep-linking itself is interesting. But placed in context with the powerful CAKE platform and all the other releases past and in future, marketers have never had such powerful tools for their mobile performance marketing campaigns. MM

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ANALYSIS

JUNE 2016

The X-Factor Ivan Maksic, regional manager UK at Infobip, looks at the background to the widespread adoption of 2-factor authentication on mobile via SMS nline services and internet companies have changed the paradigm of purchases and service consumption in the last 15 years. With the emergence of email, news portals, social and travel networks, eCommerce sites and mobile apps, many aspects of people’s daily lives have been transferred online. The likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and others opened up a new world in which a range of activities are easily done remotely, and opportunities for entertainment, learning, shopping, dating and banking are accessible at all times, from any location, as long as there’s an internet connection. This trend is accelerating, and the gains in terms of availability and convenience for consumers have been tremendous. The landscape has changed for companies as well. For the first time in history, the so-called billion user

opportunity presented itself for businesses to pursue, without depending on massive distribution and logistics. Online companies could aspire to serve people beyond the region, country, physical operations or distribution borders that placed limitations on traditional businesses. Anyone in the world is now a potential user, as long as they’re online. The shift also brought about a new set of security concerns, virtually unknown in the pre-internet era. A new space opened up for abuse, fuelled by the growing number of online profiles and accounts maintained by consumers. These profiles keep large amounts of information on users, something the old paradigm of service consumption had little problem with.

One-factor problem: password laziness The amount and scope of user information held in online profiles is stunning. It

goes far beyond basic profile details, and includes activity and purchase history, personal documents like photos and videos, home address, travel details and dating preferences, to name just a few. Family status and purchase power can be inferred, and future behaviour predicted on the basis of information kept in online profiles. All this data is sometimes protected by only one authentication factor, usually a

“GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK WERE AMONG THE FIRST ONES TO BUILD THE SECOND FACTOR AROUND THE MOBILE PHONE – A DEVICE THAT A LARGE NUMBER OF USERS AROUND THE WORLD NOT ONLY ALREADY HAD, BUT KEPT NEARBY AT ALL TIMES”

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ANALYSIS

hardware, chips or tokens to deliver the second factor is virtually impossible from the integration, maintenance and customer support perspective. It’s also not adequate from the user experience standpoint, ease of use being a fundamental requirement for online services that seek global adoption. In light of that, the demand for the second factor to be smooth to introduce and easy to use by people around the world is far from unreasonable.

Connectivity to telecoms globally

combination of a username and a password. Increasingly, this is seen as insufficient, and additional verification mechanisms and layers are being examined. For good reason, too. Around 55 per cent of internet users are estimated to have the same password for most of their online profiles and accounts. Some sources cite around 60 per cent of UK consumers saying they only used passwords they could remember. It’s not unreasonable to assume some of those passwords are weak, and likely to be used for more than one service. On top of that, almost 30 per cent of consumers admitted they knew passwords belonging to a friend, relative, partner or colleague. High-profile security breaches in 2014 and 2015 also cast doubt on the adequacy of passwords alone as viable authentication mechanisms. In the infamous Dropbox scare, hackers stole around 7m login details from other services, and tried to use them on Dropbox, counting on password reuse. In November 2015, toymaker VTech saw millions of parents’ accounts accessed, and 6.4m children’s profiles compromised. One of the reasons was poor password security. In 2015, A clever teenager gained control of CIA director John Brennan’s account and accessed sensitive information Mr Brennan had in his email attachments. The iCloud hack of August 2014 saw celebrities’ pictures stolen, with actress Jennifer Lawrence among those hurt in a serious privacy violation. When investigated, it revealed a security issue in the iCloud API that allowed hackers to make unlimited attempts at guessing passwords.

Secondfactor–mobilephonesolvesitall? Every day, Infobip sends more than 30m authentication messages on behalf of online companies and services in 190 countries around the world. As a concept, 2-factor authentication (2FA) is hardly a novelty. It relies on something that a user knows, and something a user has, to establish their identity. ATM transactions are a wellknown example of a 2FA system at work. When an ATM withdrawal is attempted, the system checks if the PIN code provided matches the card inserted. Withdrawal is allowed only if both factors are presented: something the person has (card) and something they know (PIN). Early on, internet services started with username and password combination as the only authentication mechanism. They tried to achieve extra security by asking consumers to use strong passwords, and change passwords from time to time. Yet, with the proliferation of online accounts, users are mostly unwilling to memorise different passwords for all the accounts they keep. As a result, risks associated with password reuse are multiplying: a stolen set of usernames and passwords from one provider can potentially be used to breach other, unrelated accounts. Online services have a particular set of challenges when introducing 2-factor authentication, implementation being the most important one. An acceptable solution should be easy to integrate, manage and scale, even for hundreds of millions or a billion users. Clearly, distributing extra

The new paradigm required new thinking, and new solutions. Google and Facebook were among the first to build the second factor around the mobile phone – a device that a large number of users around the world already had. Not only had, but kept nearby at all times. Delivering the one time PIN (OTP) in an SMS message, or via a voice service, and asking users to enter this OTP when logging in to a service was simple enough in terms of usability and acceptance. Technically, OTP delivery to users’ mobile phones was relatively easy to establish through API integrations with A2P SMS or voice platforms, which also provided integration and tech support. Yet, smooth integration could not be the only requirement. Facing the challenge of having to authenticate users all around the world, online services are even more interested in authentication service reach – i.e. the capacity to deliver one-time PINs to any mobile phone in the world - and within a reasonable timeframe. This involves deep technical integration with telecoms, to make sure the delivery paths are stable and reliable. Navigating the world of telecoms can be quite complex, dealing not only with several operators in each country to achieve full coverage, but also with specific country regulations. In recent years, it became possible for digital companies to overcome this challenge through global messaging platforms. These providers worked towards establishing direct connectivity to telecoms around the world, in order to enable delivery to over 800 mobile networks currently operating worldwide. This was the key to making SMS-based 2-factor authentication widely adopted by digital companies and mobile apps all over the world. MM

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COMMENT

JUNE 2016

Fighting

fraud

Gavin Stirrat, global managing director at Voluum, looks at the problem of digital advertising fraud, and the steps being taken to address it acking and fraud have existed for over 100 years, with magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne disrupting a demonstration of wireless telegraphy as early as 1903 and Alan Turing famously cracking the Enigma machine in 1939. The first computer fraud, as we would recognise it today, involved a security breach at National CSS in the USA in 1980, which was followed by an explosion in hacker groups around the world, including The 414s, The Warelords and the Chaos Computer Club. This led to US Congress enacting the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act in 1986. However, with detection so hard and penalties relatively weak, technology fraud has grown with the same trajectory as Moore’s law. Recent projections by the Association of National Advertisers (ASA), put the advertising investment wasted due to bot fraud at $7bn (£4.86bn) this year. With global digital ad spend at $67bn, that is considerable.

Cross-industry action Clearly, more needs to be done to aggressively deal with this issue. Unified, cross-industry action is required, but unfortunately the entire value chain is not incentivised to do so: if you are part of the digital advertising ecosystem, a

significant amount of fraud is running across your platform - whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. To immediately eradicate it will have a significant impact on revenues – and in an era of VC-backed technologies, that’s a difficult discussion. When we launched Voluum DSP in the UK we were in a somewhat different position. Voluum comes from a privately-owned, profitable company and - prior to launch the DSP had little revenue. We recognised that this was a unique opportunity to take a proactive approach to removing fraud from our platform. Our first step was to evaluate the existing anti-fraud vendors on the market. After testing technology capabilities, we began discussing commercials. Unfortunately, we then hit our first challenge: most fraud verification tools operate on a CPM model, based on the number of times their database is queried. However, we want to ensure our inventory is filtered pre-bid. This means we would have to call their servers for our entire bid-stream, many billions of times a day. In layman’s terms, this would have resulted in a bill of over $1m per day – even before any revenue flows! Thankfully, we resolved this challenge with Pixalate, who pass us their entire fraud database each evening, enabling us to query the database locally as many times as we wish.

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Voluum Trust score We then wanted to conduct a more thorough analysis of the inventory received from our exchange partners. We therefore developed a proprietary piece of technology that awards a multi-attribute, Voluum Trust score to every app within the entire iOS App and Google Play stores, based on a variety of criteria, from how many times it’s been downloaded, how recently, the number of reviews, and the spread of scores, plus a variety of other variables. In this way, we can see what real consumer engagement is with the app and judge how likely the traffic is going to be genuine. Using these two tools, we are able to filter out the vast majority of fraudulent traffic before our customer’s even have a chance to bid on it. So having established a robust anti-fraud

Moore’s Law of Computer Fraud

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“RECENT PROJECTIONS PUT THE ADVERTISING INVESTMENT WASTED DUE TO BOT FRAUD AT $7BN THIS YEAR” solution, we wanted to test what happened to campaigns when fraud is removed, with particular attention paid to the sorts of KPIs usually measured by brands and agencies. Our initial hypothesis was that the removal of fraudulent traffic would have a positive impact and campaign performance KPIs

COMMENT

Solving the fraud verification business model

would improve. However, this was not the case. When fraud was removed performance dropped, often by as much as 10 per cent. And herein lies the challenge: if you are buying a fixed CPM from a variety of inventory sources, the blend of performance from real and fraudulent traffic is going to give you a better looking set of results. Therefore, remove fraud and performance drops – however, you know these are now real consumers you are engaging with. Another industry symptom that allows fraudulent behaviour to go unchecked is how success is too often measured. The most common buy metric in mobile remains CPC (cost-per-click), which is a function of CTR (clickthrough rate) This makes no sense for brand advertisers, who are seeking

The digital advertising value chain must unite to solve the ad fraud challenge together

to influence an audience, nor for direct response advertisers, who want to push people down the funnel to a purchase. A click is not an indicator of either, and yet we continue to hear: “I don’t want a CTR under 1.0 per cent”, or – even worse – negotiating how low the click price can go. A click is one of the easiest things to fake with a bot. Bots can download apps; they can fill in forms. Currently, for now at least, they don’t buy chocolate bars.

Dealing with fraud Criminals are using ever-more sophisticated means to defraud advertisers of money. Our advice when trying to deal with this fraud would be as follows. Firstly, take a firm and proactive approach to advertising fraud, no matter where you sit in the value chain – from advertiser, agency, platform, publisher – so we address this problem together. Secondly, find partners you can work with, from both a technical and commercial perspective, whether this is pre-bid or via post campaign analysis and make-goods. Finally, look at your performance metrics and the prices you’re paying and consider where this race to the bottom ends. Fraud is a serious issue and one we are never likely to completely eradicate from the digital advertising ecosystem. However, by working together and taking a proactive approach, we believe it is an issue that can be managed successfully. MM

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ANALYSIS

A holistic view of location David Murphy talks to PlaceIQ CEO Duncan McCall about the evolution of location data ith the possible exception of virtual reality, there’s no hotter topic in mobile right now than location. In the early days, it was all about in-themoment marketing: we know you’re near one of our outlets right now, so let’s hit you with an offer on your phone to tempt you in. More recently, the excitement has been around location as a proxy for a user’s interests, a cookie for the real world, if you like. Where you go says a lot about the things you’re interested in, so let’s use that information to hit you with relevant offers on your phone, not necessarily while you’re at one of those places, but when you’re at home in the evening with the time to act on it. Now, according to PlaceIQ CEO Duncan McCall, location is entering a third phase, where location data doesn’t exist in a silo, but can be integrated with myriad other data sets to gain a much deeper understanding of your customers as they interact with your brand and your competitors across multiple channels. “All the interactions we have are becoming digital, from watching TV to going fishing,” says McCall. “They all have a digital element to them, so the question has to be: how do you connect them together? There is no universal cookie, so what is the universal omnipresent force? The ubiquity of mobile devices and the signals emitted from them means location can serve that role. Connecting to that data and making sense of it helps you build a new, observed model for consumer understanding.”

Impeccable credentials PlaceIQ has impeccable location credentials. Not only has it been at it longer than most companies operating in the space

– six years – but as McCall is keen to point out, the company was purpose-built with technology in mind. “We started in data with no aspirations around advertising,” he says. “It was about creating the best quality location intelligence platform, nothing to do with advertising. In fact one of our first offerings was one of the first mobile foot traffic measurement solutions, called Place Visit Rate.” The move into advertising came as a result of customer demand. “People were telling us that there was a real lack of good quality data in the mobile advertising space,” says McCall. “So we moved into the space with a mobile activation business and a media buy wrapped into data, measurement and analytics, and got a tremendous reception.” McCall concedes that the location space is a busy one, with lots of companies claiming to have the best, most accurate solution. “There are a bunch of companies who have piled into this space, but the concept of location involves a complicated set of technologies, with many elements in the stack and multiples shades of grey,” he says. “If I were looking for a partner in this space, I would want someone with legacy and history and who has been focused on understanding the tech for a long time.” He also feels the topic of location data accuracy has become a complex topic for brands and media agencies alike. “The accuracy of the location itself is not really the challenge because no one controls that,” he says. “What really matters is how a company deals with the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the make-up of the physical world and understanding that

multiple factors, such as environment and personal use, can greatly influence accuracy. A new PlaceIQ solution called Dynamic Distancing greatly enhances the way marketers can address this issue,” McCall says. PlaceIQ has also begun offering new ways for brands to leverage its location data and insights, including granting the ability for larger enterprise customers to license its platform. “Big corporations are starting to recognise that location is an incredibly powerful way to understand their customer and their competitors,” he says. Talking to McCall, it’s clear how much importance he attaches to the concept of seeing location data in the round, rather than in isolation. To this end, PlaceIQ has put a number of partnerships in place with other data providers, including Rentrak for TV, Clear Channel for outdoor and IRI for CPG purchases, that enables customers to connect the dots. One example of how this works in practice would be to be able to tie consumer visits to retail stores to people who saw the retailer’s ad on TV to establish a link between the two activities, should one exist. “We are starting to see the first signs of our vision falling into place,” he says. “Location is so much more than geofencing and proximity. It’s a new way of understanding consumer behaviour that can be appended across lots of apps and media and well beyond advertising and marketing into the supply chain and many other areas of the business. It’s an incredibly exciting space to be in as we see brands waking up to its full potential.” MM

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Reality.

ANALYSIS

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Augmented Annie Weinberger, worldwide head of HP Aurasma, looks at how augmented reality can be used to deliver immersive digital experiences

he augmented reality market continues to heat up as software and hardware innovations allow companies and individuals to create and deliver specialized content on mobile devices. Augmented reality, or AR, is the layering of digital content on physical materials. It is powerful technology that ‘brings print to life’ when scanned with a mobile device. Note that AR is not to be confused with virtual reality, or VR, which is delivered through headsets or specialized hardware to completely take over a person’s visual perspective, bringing them into a completely digital environment.

Leading platform It’s exciting to be at the forefront of this industry at Aurasma. We’re the world’s leading augmented reality platform with over 200,000 customers using the technology to make print interactive. Our customers are using Aurasma for marketing, training, and educational purposes across different verticals, use cases, and age groups. Our users include world-renowned commercial brands, as well as primary school-age classrooms and educators. In addition to an app available on the Apple App Store and Google Play, Aurasma includes an intuitive, drag-anddrop AR creation studio. We are laserfocused on ease of creation, and users with no formal technical training can build, launch, share, and track their own augmented reality campaigns. Brands and agencies looking to engage with their customers and activate mobile usage are harnessing the power

of Aurasma augmented reality with tremendous results. Each company has its own target audience, goal, and strategy when it comes to enhancing their marketing strategy with augmented reality. Companies use the Aurasma studio to create augmented reality content, and end users access AR campaigns through the existing Aurasma app or branded apps embedded with Aurasma technology.

Aurasma app Many companies looking to launch an AR campaign quickly without the time to develop and release a mobile app will opt to use the existing Aurasma app that is available on the market today. For instance, Construguide magazine, which focuses on the construction sector, is bringing its pages to life with exclusive digital video through the Aurasma app. This helps to bring the construction community together with interactive learning and discovery. The magazine is enhancing its 85,000 issues in monthly circulation and updating content regularly to keep the reading experience as dynamic as possible. Using augmented reality allows the magazine to “create a memorable and unforgettable experience for our business customers and gives them the opportunity to incorporate additional information in more than just a printed page” says Construguide director, Marco de la Paz. Other companies who seek to retain their branding throughout the mobile app and AR experience can have Aurasma build them a white-label app

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or use the Aurasma SDK to embed AR into their existing app. Mohawk Paper, a long-time Aurasma customer, offers interactive print newsletters that launch AR through the Mohawk Live app. In a recent announcement, Mohawk’s senior vice president of marketing Bart Robinson declared: “Aurasma’s augmented reality technology has enabled readers of the Mohawk Maker Quarterly an opportunity to go beyond the printed story to enjoy a multidimensional experience with bonus content. We feel the technology is enhancing the print experience, to make consuming printed materials more relevant than ever.” Mohawk readers can look forward to seeing the experience within the branded app on a regular basis, scanning the printed pages to discover actionable digital surprises. We’re thrilled to be bringing even more to our community of AR users with the recent release of Aurasma 5.0, which included a brand new Aurasma app, as well as some fantastic feature updates to Aurasma studio. We believe AR is not a far-off concept; it’s for today and it’s for everyone and so we’ve made it easier for marketers to create AR experiences with pre-loaded templates based on our top AR use cases in Aurasma studio. Brands and agencies can use the templates to tie in interactive augmented reality to their existing marketing channels – enhancing print ads, direct mail, in-store signage, and more. We’ve also updated our analytics with a visual scorecard that tracks all aspects of your AR campaign. Be sure to check them out and let us know what you think. MM

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COMMENT

Snacking time Mike Hawkyard, MD at Amuzo, urges brands to make the most of a mobile moment ife is full of mobile moments short digital interactions that become second nature very quickly. Speed of access to specific content, at any time, in any location, has taught digital natives that there is almost no time period too short to launch an app and complete an intended action. Be it checking the football scores, playing a game, booking transport or sharing a photo with friends – find just a few minutes and you’ll satisfy your desire, before either moving on to the next task, or putting your phone back in your pocket. With all these experiences and interactions at your fingertips, it is no surprise that trying to keep your audience’s attention on your app for any length of time is extremely challenging. Why should they open your app, not a competitor’s?

At the same time, try demonstrating progression. You may only be able to squeeze one game of Temple Run in, but the gold you collected will help you upgrade your character, so that next time you play, you have the opportunity to travel further. Both of these game are great examples of designing for touchscreen devices. Drag, swipe or pinch movements are significantly more engaging then tapping. And it’s not just games – consider Tinder - swiping left or right has huge significance in that app.

Repeatable content Short, repeatable content is a great start - ensure your audience can complete a meaningful experience in two minutes so they never think ‘I’ve not got time for that’. This could be watching a short video or playing an entire level of a game. Support this with plenty of additional content too so that, should the user find more time has become available to them, they can continue their experience. Think Angry Birds. You can complete one level in no time at all and there is always plenty more waiting for you, with subtle little treats and rewards to bring you back again and again.

RTÉ’s Swipe TV app puts the viewer in control

Personalising content is a great advantage. The RTÉ Swipe app allows viewers of certain shows to decide the plot of the stories they are watching. A series of short videos are filmed that all end in a decision where the child is asked to choose what happens next. And the ultimate in personalised content with relation to videos is uploading your own content, recorded on a smartphone or Go-Pro - something many of us have done on various social networks.

Thanks to YouTube, Facebook and vloggers, we no longer expect Oscar-worthy content production from video. Users are prepared to embrace lower production standards in favour of quality content. So why should these clips and principles not be used in work applications as well? With Generation Y in particular being selfieand video-centric, you have reporters within your company armed with specific knowledge to share and a smart device to record the action. This helps fulfil another objective of good app design; keeping your content fresh. An app of this nature for a company gives their staff the ability to quickly respond to events relevant to their profession and share them with colleagues to gain feedback and insight. The possibilities are endless; branched scenarios can be created to take staff through complex procedures, sales teams can quickly revise a topic before meeting a potential client and you can get instant front-line feedback to improve your products and services. Gamification and feedback systems can also be used to create opportunities to reward use and refine content to maximize effectiveness. The final tip is not to wait for someone to open your app – make your app intelligent and help your user. ‘Your windscreen is frozen this morning, click here and I will defrost it for you before you go outside.’ Embracing mobile and attempting to solve the challenges of engagement leads to innovation, discovery and new opportunities. Utilise the habits and skills of digital natives rather than fighting against them. Who knows what solutions you might find around the corner and how it could revolutionise your mobile marketing. MM @mikehawkyard; www.amuzo.com

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COMMENT

JUNE 2016

CANNES: YOU BELIEVE IT As the ad world descends on the French Riviera, Jon Mew, chief operating officer at the IAB (UK), takes stock of the digital advertising business

think it’s impossible to feel disgruntled in Cannes. The sunshine, sea, rosé and amazing yachts always remind me how lucky I am to work in media and as soon as I arrive I can’t stop smiling. Judging by the look on people’s faces I get the impression most of them are in a pretty similar mindset, and I think that’s a big factor in why Cannes is such a great place to do business. And I don’t mean the type of business the couple on the red carpet got up to late at night last year. It’s also a great place to stop and take stock, and if you looked at the 12 months since the last Cannes Festival and the world of digital, you’d be forgiven for thinking digital marketing has had a tough year. The adblockalypse, ad fraud and viewability have all hit the headlines with a growing number of articles about dissatisfaction with digital advertising. But despite the increase in this type of coverage, brand investment continues to increase rapidly. In fact in the past 12 months, spend on mobile advertising in the UK increased by more than any other year, ever. It’s no surprise though, that the digital naysayers are increasingly expressing their worries. Digital has grown, particularly in the UK, to be the biggest channel by far. When you are the biggest, it’s only right that there are new pressures and more scrutiny.

Massive opportunitites Undoubtedly, there are still big areas for us to address, but looking at the situation with a sprinkling of Cannes sunshine, actually these are also massive opportunities. We’ve got an industry that is now galvanised to improve the advertising experience, building on LEAN and the

forthcoming IAB charter. We are confident the digital advertising experience will be better than ever before. Also, as the industry makes sweeping changes to address ad fraud, there are now simple ways to make sure every impression is a human one, and with great progress on viewability we are setting standards that no other medium can come near. The week after Cannes we’ll be launching new research that gives a comprehensive insight into mobile creativity and what consumers really think of different ad formats. I’m long enough in the tooth and have done enough digital ad studies to know the outcomes won’t be a great shocker, rather a useful reminder that the same common sense rules still apply. People want an ad-funded internet; they don’t want to pay, they just want to feel in control of the ad experience. So don’t make them feel like you’re taking control away. Don’t overlay ads you can’t close, don’t play sound when people don’t expect it and give me the option to know how you use my data and opt out.

Simple, creative and relevant When it comes down to it, people will always say they don’t like ads, whatever the medium. For a brand to stand a chance of cutting through, it needs to keep it simple, be creative and be relevant. Whilst it’s really important we don’t all bury our head in the Plage du Midi, there is every reason for us to take a moment over another rosé and remember how lucky we are to work, not only in media, but also in digital. While there are things to improve, I’m grateful we’re solving issues in a medium that has not only grown faster than anything before, but still has so much more potential and is so important to people. In fact, mobile

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is the consumer’s most important device by far: one study we did showed that for 18-24 year olds, almost twice the number of people said they’d rather live without a fridge than a phone. As I write this, I don’t know who the award winners will be at Cannes, but I can guarantee that mobile will take centre stage again amongst the best campaigns. Despite this, I’m sure we haven’t even scratched the surface of the infinite creative possibilities that mobile offers. So enjoy the rosé if you’re in Cannes, absolutely focus on the areas where we can improve digital, but remember too that in the last 12 months, more brands than ever before have turned to digital, and particularly mobile, as the channel to reach and wow their customers. I hope the red carpet is ready and waiting for you. MM

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