Mobile Marketing March 2015 edition by Mobile Marketing Magazine

ISSUE 19 • MARCH 2015

REALITY BITES Virtual Reality’s second coming

CITY CLICKERS The cities putting mobile at the centre of regeneration

TRADING PLACES Charting the evolution of programmatic and what it means for mobile

DIGITAL DEMOCRACY How the ballot box is going mobile

Open For Business

OpenX’s Martin Price on how the company is reinventing mobile advertising

PLUS: MOTHERCARE ON MOBILE • AWARD WINNERS • CORPORATE ACCELERATORS

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MARCH 2015

CONTENTS

IN THIS ISSUE :

Hello and welcome to the latest print edition of Mobile Marketing, as the industry decamps once again to Barcelona for a week of standsurfing, networking and partying. The excitement this year is likely to be around wearables, the Internet of Things, driverless cars and intelligent buildings and cities. The common theme here is the fact that mobile tech and connectivity have moved way beyond mobile phones – so the next question is how brands harness the connected nature of myriad other devices to engage with consumers. In setting out their strategy to do so, they will have to look beyond the obvious. For while much of the buzz around mobile marketing concerns advertising, you could argue that even where the mobile phone is concerned, it functions best as a pull rather than push medium, where the choice of how and whether to engage with a brand is left to the consumer. Some of the best examples of good mobile marketing are also the least glitzy – the text message to thank you for your order and confirm what time it will arrive, or the app that enables you to pay for your meal in a restaurant without leaving your seat or bothering the staff. Neither of these examples involves pushing unsolicited messages or ads towards the consumer, and when the medium or channel in question is a car, a fridge, a thermostat, a watch or a connected T-shirt, the need to respect the context of the medium becomes even more key. So as the industry descends on Barcelona, I’ll be keeping a special eye out for any solutions that target the Internet of Everything in a way that recognises the context in which these devices are used, as well as the fact that people have been using them for years without enjoying the benefit of (or having to put up with) advertising on them. Enjoy the show, and enjoy the issue! David Murphy, editorial director

SUBSCRIBE If you want to be sure of receiving your copy of the print edition of Mobile Marketing three times a year, you can subscribe today to go on our controlled circulation list. It costs just £30 (UK); or £40 (rest of the world). To take out a subscription, just send an email to: subscriptions@wearedotmedia.com and we’ll tell you what you need to do.

brand STRATEGY

NEWS REVIEW

8 Network Effect

Investigating the push towards programmatic

THE NEW TELEVISION

12 FULL SPEED

AHEAD

We chart the incredible growth of mobile video content

We look at the growing popularity of corporate accelerator programmes

DIGITAL DEMOCRACY

How countries around the world are taking to mobile voting

17 THE DISRUPTORS The hottest startups put under Kirsty Styles’ spotlight

REDEFINING PREMIUM Teads CMO Rebecca Mahony on the benefits of outstream video ad formats

REALITY BITES The latest news from the worlds of augmented and virtual reality

THE OPENX APPROACH TO PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING

CELEBRATING EXCELLENCE 2014 Mobile Marketing Award winners revealed

30 SIM CitY How mobile tech is driving Smart City projects around the UK

THE SALES MACHINE How Simartis’ Bubble platform works

LOCATION STATIONS xAd’s Theo Theodorou on the power of location data

PLATFORM PLAY

CANDIDATE IS KING

In conversation So says Digital with Phunware VP, Gurus’ Matt Hawkes advertising evangelist, Jon Hook

BUCKLEY ON...

Location – lessons learned from the ZagMe launch 15 years ago

Editorial director: David Murphy – david.murphy@mobilemarketingmagazine.com +44 (0)7976 927 062 Commercial director: John Owen – john.owen@wearedotmedia.com +44 (0)7769 674 824 Business development manager: Richard Partridge – richard.partridge@wearedotmedia.com Event sales director: Shelley Dowsett – shelley.dowsett@wearedotmedia.com Production editor: Andy Penfold Designer: Alistair Gillan– aQ2 Ltd Online editor: Alex Spencer – alex.spencer@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Senior reporter: Kirsty Styles – kirsty.styles@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Reporter: Tim Maytom – tim.maytom@mobilemarketingmagazine.com Event manager: Hannah Wallace – hannah.wallace@wearedotmedia.com Contributors: Russell Buckley, Kirsty Styles Print: Advent Print Group info@advent-colour.co.uk For a paid subscription please email: subscriptions@mobilemarketingmagazine.com One Year Subscription Rates – UK: £30.00; ROW: £40.00 Mobile Marketing is published by Dot Media Ltd., 114-116 Curtain Road, London EC2A 3AH www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

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Concept | Design | Build bluequest.co.uk

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MARCH 2015

COMMENT

brand STRATEGY BY CHRIS BERTIN, GROUP MOBILE COMMERCE MANAGER AT MOTHERCARE othercare’s mobile journey started in May 2011, when we launched dedicated mobile sites built on the Demandware mobile platform. But we really ramped things up after that – we were set a three-month target to build our first app. It was tempting at first to do something ‘quick and dirty’ that we could look to improve once the initial pressure of hitting the deadline was over, but we soon decided to go in the opposite direction and try to achieve something special right off the bat. People come to Mothercare when they’re about to begin one of the most life-changing experiences they will ever go through. We felt we had a duty to reflect the Mothercare ethos of offering advice, guidance and help instead of just an easy way to shop on your phone. We believed in a content-driven strategy and wanted to give customers reasons to come back to the app every day. We wanted the app to be useful in order to achieve downloads, but more importantly we wanted to remain on our customer’s phones for the long term. We were fortunate in finding a good partner, NN4M, to work with – and that some of the content we used to populate the app already existed within the business. We therefore set out to create a dedicated features section in the app that included a week-by-week Pregnancy Guide, Mothercare TV for advice and help videos, a Baby Name Generator, Contraction and Kick Counters, and a collection of free lullabies and nursery rhymes. The app seemed the right place to bring all these great features together in a convenient location for mums, dads and mums-to-be.

Rave reviews When the app launched, initially on iPhone only, the reaction from customers exceeded our expectations. We made it to the top spot in the App Store’s Lifestyle chart and 24th in the overall chart, and we gained rave reviews and feedback from our customers. The only thing we hadn’t really anticipated was a slight backlash from our Android-owning

customers, who wanted to know when we were going to develop an app for them. The answer to that was not for another nine months. There were a couple of reasons for this. The first was that we started again from scratch – we didn’t want to just port over the iPhone experience to Android. The second is that Android is a much more fragmented market. Differing screen sizes, OS versions and processor speeds can create device-specific bugs that can be difficult to fix without creating further issues on other devices. We had a dozen or so Android devices in-house and outsourced another dozen, but we still found issues relating to specific devices, so the testing and bug-fixing phases took much longer than anticipated. In hindsight, it was probably a mistake to backdate the app to support Android OS version 2.3, because although back then it

made up around 30 per cent of the Android customer base, we discovered that they tended to be the type of customer who didn’t shop with us on mobile. Therefore a lot of the time we spent on bug fixing on older devices could have been avoided.

Digitally-led business We’re fortunate that the success of the apps helped raise the profile of mobile within the business. Since then, we’ve seen mobile grow to become a huge part of our online proposition. During our peak Q3, 75 per cent of our online traffic came from mobile devices, (50 per cent viewed our mobile site, 18 per cent viewed our full site via tablet and 7 per cent came from our apps). App conversion is also, on average, more than double that of our mobile site, and our app is downloaded every two minutes. This proves what we have long believed – that our customer base is tech-savvy and predisposed to using mobile to browse and shop. As I’m sure every parent knows, bringing up children takes over your life, so mums and dads have less and less time to sit down at a PC to shop. Five minutes here or there on the phone can be the only opportunity they have to engage with us. We’ve enjoyed great success with our apps, but we know we can’t stand still. We are thinking about a beacon trial later this year to see how we can use mobile in-store, and looking further ahead we also see great potential in wearables, given the importance of health monitoring for mums, mums-to-be and their little ones. We also have the luxury of a little longer than three months to fully think through and implement our mCommerce strategy. MM

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NEWS REVIEW

MARCH 2015

NEWS

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

Microsoft Unveils Windows 10 and HoloLens

iven the widespread dislike that Windows 8 inspired, it seemed unlikely that anything would be able to overshadow the announcement of its successor at Microsoft’s Windows 10 event on 21 January. But along with an extensive overhaul of the core OS, which is being offered as a free upgrade to existing customers, Microsoft revealed a more unexpected addition to its line: the HoloLens. A wireless ‘mixed reality’ headset that can project three-dimensional holograms onto the user’s vision, the HoloLens sounds more like a gadget from Minority Report than a real consumer product. There are reasons for that – the device is still a prototype, and current use cases seem more focused on the enterprise than the home. You can find out more

about the HoloLens, and the competition it faces, on page 36. The headset is just one part of Microsoft’s cross-platform ambitions. As well as desktop, Windows 10 promises to run across smartphones, smart TVs, connected whiteboards, the Xbox One, and potentially even more devices in the future. “Stay tuned as our device family expands,” said Microsoft VP Terry Myerson at the event. A year ago, this boast would have seemed dubious at best, but Microsoft’s Q4 financial results showed that its Surface tablets and Lumia smartphones are finding a new lease of life. If Windows 10 can deliver on the promises made by its predecessor, Microsoft may also have the software it needs to drive that hardware business.

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Google halts Glass development After years of debate over whether Glass was the next big thing or just an accessory for ‘Glassholes’, Google has closed its Explorer program, which sold the smart glasses to developers and other early adopters for $1,500 (or £1,000 in the UK), and stopped production of the current model. Google later admitted the decision was motivated by the project’s failure to meet internal targets, but insists that it is still committed to bringing the smart glasses to market. The project is being moved from the company’s experimental Google X division and put under the watchful eye of Tony Fadell, CEO of smart home company and recent Google acquisition Nest, to develop the next iteration of the product. This could mean a bright new dawn for Glass, but for now the move has left many of the developers who bought the prototype device complaining that their investment has been wasted. At least one brand was likely cursing the timing of the announcement – just days earlier, UK supermarket Tesco had unveiled a Glassware shopping app for customers.

MARCH 2015

British Telecom swoops to acquire mobile network EE BT is stepping back into the mobile business with its £12.5bn acquisition of EE. After announcing in December that it was considering buying either EE or O2, BT signed on the dotted line to acquire EE from Orange and Deutsche Telekom in early February. When the deal is finalised in March 2016, BT will become the UK’s single largest mobile network, with 24.5m customers, 7.7m of whom are on 4G. As well as the estimated £1.6bn the acquisition will add to BT’s annual sales, the telco is keen to

Snapchat drills down on monetisation strategy After a busy 2014, which saw it land over 100m monthly users and turn down a $3bn-plus acquisition offer from Facebook, Snapchat entered the New Year with a focus on actually making money from its messaging app. This got off to a rocky start, as it was revealed that Snapchat was asking advertisers for a minimum commitment of $750,000 daily spend, for an offering that didn’t include any reporting capabilities. This didn’t stop big brands like McDonald’s, NBC Universal and Macy’s getting on board, however, and early results have been overwhelmingly positive. The options available to Snapchat advertisers grew further with the January launch of Discover, a feature that brought daily editorial content – and ads – from the likes of ESPN, CNN and Cosmopolitan into the app. Shortly afterwards, Madonna became the first pop star to debut a music video through the channel rather than YouTube or TV.

NEWS REVIEW

transform itself into a ‘quad play’ provider by adding a mobile network to its existing offering of fixed telephony, broadband and pay TV. Before opting for EE, BT was competing with a number of other parties to acquire O2, the operator business it actually co-founded back in 1985 as Cellnet. Sky and TalkTalk have both reportedly been in acquisition talks with O2, and Hutchison Whampoa made a confirmed bid of £10.25bn for the business in January. Already the owner of UK operator Three, if Hutchison’s O2 bid is successful then BT’s reign as the country’s largest operator will be short-lived.

GAFA Quarterly results: Q4, 2014

GAFA revenues Mobile accounted for 69 per cent of Facebook’s total ad revenues in Q4 2014, making $2.48bn for the company. By comparison, a year earlier mobile ads brought in revenues of $1.49bn, or 53 per cent of the total.

• Apple $74.6bn • Amazon $29.33bn • Google $18.1bn • Facebook $3.85bn

GAFA profits Apple sold a record 74m iPhones in Q4 – equivalent to 34,000 iPhones every hour for three whole months – up 46 per cent year-on-year, thanks to the popularity of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Over the same period, however, iPad sales dropped 18 per cent, to 21.4m units.

• Apple $18bn • Google $4.8bn • Amazon $214m • Facebook $701m

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

Network Effect David Murphy looks at what the rise and rise of programmatic means for the mobile advertising ecosystem

ne word dominated the mobile advertising landscape in 2014: programmatic. And 2015 looks like being no different, as almost everyone in the mobile advertising business seeks to show off their programmatic credentials in a bid to secure their future. But how big a deal is programmatic in mobile, and what impact is it having on the way mobile advertising campaigns are planned, booked and executed? James Chandler, global mobile director at media agency Mindshare, suspects there may be some hype at play: “You do hear a lot of people in the programmatic game beating the drum and saying there is a lot of it about, and the fact that Apple, the most closed company in the world is now working with Rubicon on programmatic, is obviously significant,” he says. “But then you hear the other side of the coin where it’s not even reached maturity on desktop yet and here we are trying to figure out mobile. Maybe we should look at the mistakes that have been made using online as a proxy for mobile and not try to run before we can walk.”

Alex Kozloff, who heads up the IAB’s mobile initiatives, says there is a lot of interest in the subject from advertisers and agencies. “As part of our planning for 2015 we asked all our members where we should focus our efforts and programmatic came through loud and clear as one of the key things they are interested in,” she says. Some of the stats kicking around do seem to justify the interest and excitement, and the need to stake your claim as a programmatic expert. At an event staged by SSP (Supply Side Platform) PubMatic late last year, IDC analyst Karsten Weide revealed that global programmatic spend, including all mobile and online display and video advertising, accounted for $4.8bn (£3.1bn) in 2013, and was set to almost double to $8.5bn in 2014, rising again to $14.7bn this year, to $38.1bn next, and $55.3bn by 2017. By which point, if that figure was achieved, it would mean that 59 per cent of total global display ad spend is being bought programmatically. “Anything that can be automated will be automated,” the analyst noted. Another study, conducted by the IAB

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in partnership with MTM last year, found that in 2013, 28 per cent of digital display spend, and 37 per cent of mobile spend, was traded programmatically. Most importantly, the study forecast that 60 per cent of mobile display inventory would be programmatic in 2014.

The Google effect Some are skeptical about those figures, while others accept them, but believe that two companies are skewing the picture to a disproportionate degree. “The spend in programmatic on mobile outside of Facebook and Google is very small,” says Mark Slade, managing director EMEA at Opera Mediaworks. On the other hand, Jon Buss, UK managing director at Criteo says: “Programmatic spend on mobile is growing massively with the publishers we work with. We are plugged into a reasonable number of platforms to buy mobile inventory in this automated way, and if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be growing so fast.” And at PubMatic, Dan Wilson, senior director, emerging media, EMEA and APAC,

MARCH 2015

per cent margin through arbitrage (buying inventory in bulk at one price and selling it on to clients at a profit) and agencies didn’t like that because they were making much slimmer margins. So part of this is about the agencies increasing their margins by taking the ad network out of the media plan.” Another key driver is increased efficiency. “It is more efficient because you’re making much more use of technology,” says Gavin Stirrat, COO at StrikeAd, one of the earliest mobile DSPs in the market. “This allows things to happen at greater scale. When you’re buying from a DSP, the DSP is plugged into multiple exchanges and DMPs (Data Management Platforms) so you can achieve very refined targeting at scale. Programmatic really took off online off the back of retargeting, because to work well, retargeting needs vast scale, and programmatic delivers that.”

ANALYSIS

“PMPs are still niche,” says Craig Palli, chief strategy officer at Fiksu. “In mobile, they started to creep in about a year ago and there is advertiser interest, but we need to build publisher interest in putting the inventory in there. We need to build the infrastructure to feed the impressions in.” Rob Kramer, GM, mobile at SSP, OpenX, agrees, but says this will change as the type of brands that advertise on mobile changes. “I don’t know the ratio today, but RTB dominates,” he says. “You have to remember, most early RTB transactions were around performance advertising, which did not need a PMP component. But now that you have brand display dollars moving into programmatic, it makes sense, and we are seeing brands who want exclusive access to certain types of premium inventory and publishers.”

Programmatic defined

says: “The world is far bigger than Google. If you look at the growth in mobile supply, a lot of it has been polarised at two ends. One is the Flashlab games and freemium games we all use but no one clicks on the ads on purpose, then at the other end where we play, you have the premium inventory. A lot of publishers were slow to monetise mobile inventory; the shift to mobile took a lot of them by surprise and they struggled to evolve in terms of their monetisation strategies. But now they have rolled out responsive design and more engaging ad formats and are starting to see success. It’s down to clients, planners and buyers to look at opportunities outside of Google and Facebook.” So if you accept that the programmatic revolution is happening, what’s driving it? Some say (though they say it off the record), that part of the rationale is about agencies trying to increase the margin they make by building divisions that are not dissimilar to ad networks. One source told us: “If you go back to the early days of mobile media where a large proportion of the revenue went to the ad networks, they were making 40-50

At this point, a definition of programmatic might be in order. In its early days, it was synonymous with real-time bidding (RTB), where advertisers bid for the right to show their ad to a given user at a given time in a real-time auction, in much the same way as advertisers bid to come at the top of the paid search results on Google. But while auctions are still very much part of the programmatic scene, another version of programmatic, known as a private marketplace (PMP), is on the rise. In a PMP, the advertiser knows where their ad will appear and pays a pre-agreed price for it (usually higher than in an RTB auction) in a forward market, (as opposed to a real-time auction) but the inventory is still bought in a programmatic, automated manner. For media buyers and their advertiser clients, it gives them planning certainty; they can put a certain type of inventory in place, with impression volume guaranteed, at the right time to support a launch, but because the workflow is integrated and automated, it’s faster, less prone to human error and so easier and more cost effective for both the buyer and the publisher. “For an advertiser, PMPs are all about securing the first look; it’s like being first into Waitrose on a Saturday morning,” says PubMatic’s Wilson. But the volume of PMP inventory is still very small compared to RTB programmatic.

“WE STILL WANT TO BUILD THE STUFF THAT WINS AWARDS AND YOU DON’T NECESSARILY GET THAT BY FOUR OR FIVE PCS TALKING TO EACH OTHER” JAMES CHANDLER, MINDSHARE

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

On mobile, however, even that term, premium inventory, needs defining, because as StrikeAd’s Stirrat points out, it bears little resemblance to premium inventory on the web. “Private marketplaces are in a slightly different place on mobile than desktop,” he says. “On desktop it is the publisher and the title you associate the brand with, such as a premium credit card associating itself with the FT, for example. The challenge in mobile is that it forces us to redefine premium, because premium titles on mobile are not the same as desktop. Sessions are more ‘snacky’ and the brand names serving them, often games and information services, are not the ones large brands would normally associate themselves with. Brands have to get used to the fact they have to get comfortable with a new wave of publisher brands.”

Key acquisitions So what does all this mean for the traditional mobile ad networks? Some have responded by partnering with or buying programmatic companies. InMobi has tied up with The Rubicon Project, while Millennial Media bought Jumptap towards the end of 2013 to get into the DSP business, then also acquired Nexage more recently to tick the SSP and exchange boxes.

Games like Angry Birds are a prime source of programmatic inventory on mobile

don’t care if it’s mobile or desktop; if it’s programmatic or a managed service. What they care about is the consumer and the message to the consumer – whether it’s the right message reaching the right consumer at the right time. Programmatic can help a lot with that, which is why it has grown so much, but it is not the only solution and sometimes it is not the solution. This is why we provide the full suite of solutions, because advertisers need that flexibility.” Opera Mediaworks’ Slade believes that in

has defined. The ones that have no tech integration or client integration via an SDK will go to the wall.” While it’s perhaps no surprise to hear an ad network defending the role of the ad network, others also feel they have a future.

Mobile monetisation “I still think the ad networks will have a large role to play in mobile monetisation going forward,” says OpenX’s Kramer. “According to Flurry, 86 per cent of consumers’ time in mobile is spent in-app. Mobile

“FOR AN ADVERTISER, PMPS ARE ALL ABOUT SECURING THE FIRST LOOK; IT’S LIKE BEING FIRST INTO WAITROSE ON A SATURDAY MORNING” DAN WILSON, PUBMATIC “If you take Jumptap and Nexage and couple that with the existing Millennial offering, it’s a comprehensive solution,” says Todd Tran, who led Nexage in Europe and joined Millennial as part of the acquisition. “If you think about buyers and agency groups, they can look to Millennial and buy via an IO [insertion order], or programatically, use the DSP or just buy data, we are unique in the market to have all of that under one roof. “If you listen to what advertisers and agencies are telling us, they say they

order to survive in the programmatic age, ad networks need to add value. “The ones that survive will be the ones that have some technology to integrate into the publishers in a meaningful way to gain data on the customer, to define what type of audience they are,” he says. “It could be picking up their location lookups and mapping against points of interest to know they regularly go to the gym or shopping centres so that they go into whatever audience segment the ad network

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monetisation in-app comes down to having your SDK footprint in those apps, and the first people to do that were the mobile ad networks, so they have tremendous power when it comes to the monetisation of apps. Whereas the pure exchanges – ourselves, PubMatic, Rubicon – we still have some work to do. Because the ad networks were there first, they will remain relevant for the foreseeable future.” This point is echoed by Tim Finn, cofounder and CTO at data provider, Statiq.

MARCH 2015

“Speak to InMobi or Millennial and they know they have to get into programmatic, and have done so, but let’s not forget that they are sitting on the majority of the spend coming out of agencies right now,” he says. “The programmatic guys are on the right path, but they look enviously at the spend going into the ad networks.”

Location play Finn’s company is one of a new breed looking to satisfy the insatiable demand for data, in particular location data, from companies operating in the programmatic

out as a programmatic specialist back then, location has always been at the heart of what it does. Like xAd, it can use location data to target in real-time, or to build a picture of the user’s location history for later use. Blismedia’s managing director Paul Thompson estimates around 75 per cent of the company’s campaigns are realtime, the other 25 per cent based on the user’s location history. “It doesn’t always make sense to send someone a message just because they are in proximity to something,” says Thompson. “If you are in the British

“THE SPEND IN PROGRAMMATIC ON MOBILE OUTSIDE OF FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE IS VERY SMALL” MARK SLADE, OPERA MEDIAWORKS space. Formed by a bunch of ex-StrikeAd execs, Finn says the company was founded in response to the lack of clear, accurate data in the ecosystem. It uses location to pinpoint the current whereabouts of a mobile user so that advertisers can target them with relevant messages; but also to build a picture of their location history and create anonymised audience data that can be used to create segments that advertisers can target at some point in the future. The location data space is hotting up. Factual is making waves in the US, while xAd is another relatively new US firm looking to establish itself in the space. It tracks the location of 160m unique users’ via integration with over 30,000 apps, reaching 300m unique devices each month, with 300bn available monthly ad impressions and close to 1m advertisers on its platform. “Desktop targeting strategies don’t work in mobile because it’s a cookieless environment,” says xAd’s EMEA GM, Theo Theodorou. “But location is a real-world cookie, and it’s critical for online-to-offline targeting and building audiences based on their visitation history,” he says. BlisMedia is another company making a major location play. It’s been around longer than most in the space, since 2004 in fact, and while it obviously didn’t start

Airways lounge in T5 right now, we could serve you an ad on the mobile web or in-app. There would be no point serving an ad for an airline because you’ve already booked that flight, but at some point later, given your location history, that can inform the type of ad we would serve. The decision on which ad to serve is different depending on whether we are looking at your history or the here-and-now, based on analysing 40bn ad requests a day, all in real-time.”

What next? So while the battle for location data supremacy rages, what’s next for programmatic? The consensus seems to be that the shift from RTB to private marketplaces will continue this year. “2015 will be a big year for PMPs,” says Millennial Media’s Tran. “It’s an interesting evolution, where we have gone from the managed world to RTB and then halfway back to the world of PMPs and Programmatic Direct, so it’s essential that the two worlds start merging, that we don’t have two or more solutions. We need just one solution with multiple different ways you can buy to allow the advertiser to do what they want.” Jay Fowdar, chief product officer at Byyd, which rebranded from Adfonic when it pivoted from an ad network to a DSP a year ago, also expects to see growth in the

ANALYSIS

PMP space in 2015. “PMPs are still very nascent in mobile,” he says. “We thought it would be huge last year, but it was not as big as expected. But it will happen – advertisers want to do it.” But perhaps the truth about programmatic is not that it’s going to take over the mobile – and wider – advertising world (though some believe it will), but that it will settle down and find its place in the ecosystem, alongside more traditional ways of working. “Programmatic is a huge buzzword across the industry for 2015, and it is absolutely a big thing in mobile,” says the IAB’s Kozloff. “But it will never be the only way. There are so many things you can do with mobile, and the human element is still really important. There are also more creative formats that might not fit a programmatic sell. I’m never surprised to see new, different ways of getting ads onto mobile, and programmatic is massively important, but not to the exclusion of everything else.” Mindshare’s Chandler, echoing the thoughts of his boss Sir Martin Sorrell (who has gone on record to say that brand communications in the future needs to be a combination of “the maths men and mad men”) also believes there is more to mobile advertising life than programmatic. He says: “The people we hire used to be brand-driven media types with degrees from Bournemouth, and that has changed. We now have more now econometricians, statisticians and, mathematicians; they look more like business analysts. But I don’t think we will end up in a world where everything is traded programmatically. “We still want to build the stuff that wins awards and you don’t necessarily get that by four or five PCs talking to each other. Advertising is still about relationships; if programmatic enables us to do things in more efficient ways, then that should free us up to do the more creative, strategic thinking. No one gets in to this to stare at spreadsheets all day – we are in it to do the exciting stuff.” A fair point, but it’s worth remembering perhaps, that for the econometricians, statisticians and mathematicians out there, the ones rapidly infiltrating the world of advertising, the words ‘exciting stuff’ and ‘spreadsheets’ are far from mutually incompatible. MM

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

Full Speed Ahead Kirsty Styles looks at the rise and rise of accelerator programmes

ince the launch of Y Combinator back in 2005, the business accelerator space has truly come to life, with 2013 marking a record year for new programmes opening their doors. Y Comb’s first cohort included one of the internet age’s most interesting success stories – online news platform Reddit – as well as mobile location startup Loopt, which was bought for $43.4m (£28.6m) in 2012. The world’s first tech accelerator also gave early backing to Airbnb and Dropbox, now both multi-billion dollar companies. SEE-DB, created to profile each new and hopeful innovation hub, lists 227 programmes worldwide in 2015, which have supported 4,274 business, celebrated 245 exits totalling $3.4m, and seen $7.2m raised. And they admit that’s probably not even the half of it.

Crowded space Competition for certain accelerators can be high, Telefónica’s Wayra has received more than 29,000 pitches worldwide and has an admission rate of just 1.6 per cent, but in an increasingly crowded accelerator space, most new programmes are now going down the specialist route. Female Propeller for High Fliers in Dublin only accepts female-led startups, while the EyeFocus Accelerator in Berlin is dedicated simply to innovation in eye care. Many UK brands are now flocking to this kind of innovation as an alternative to in-house R&D or M&A activity. Companies are using the accelerator model to help with technological innovation, or to build an ecosystem around a specific product, like the Nike+ Fuel Lab. Some have opted to collaborate with existing programmes, such

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Community spirit is part of the appeal of accelerator culture

MARCH 2015

as in Disney’s team-up with TechStars. Brands like John Lewis, Barclays and Telefónica have also all put their name above the door on their relevant accelerators. Already this year, a new accelerator launched in January in London by delivery firm DPD, in partnership with tech fund L Marks, to help it innovate around logistics and fulfilment. As the cost of doing business in the digital age drops, starting an accelerator and supporting startups looks like an increasingly resource-efficient strategy. And if you’ve attracted and interviewed the right teams, you may have a new supplier or even a new business unit in your midst.

Unanswered questions But, there are risks, and unanswered questions around the model. How do you

distinguish the unicorns from the donkeys? How do you make strategic decisions about your direction given the little data there is on offer? Are accelerators too focused on companies that offer the clearest, short-term hope of success, meaning more complex areas are left untouched? And how do you actually turn a profit? Y Combinator took five years to start making money – perhaps that’s why Tesco set up its Rainmaking Loft as a co-working and events space, rather than a traditional accelerator programme. What differentiates your accelerator is becoming increasingly important, whether that’s how the project is funded, whether you have a specialism, or by mission – are you for good or for profit? The quality of learning resources or mentors, along with time and equity commitments, are also key

ANALYSIS

Tesco’s Rainmaking Loft is one approach to encouraging entrepreneurship and the development of ideas

considerations for startups that are looking to get involved. And accelerator owners are still ultimately trying to understand what success looks like for them, and how they measure it.

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

Acceleration stations

Here’s a lowdown of some of the startup factories and what they do Unilever Foundry Founded: May 2014 Specialism: B2B marketing programme working with Unilever marketers through a partnership with Collider accelerator in the UK, plus more worldwide Length of programme: Three months Funding structure: No equity taken Unilever pays 50 per cent of pilot project cost, with the remaining 50 per cent paid on delivery. Following this, the project may be taken on for investment by Unilever Ventures Projects: Unilever creates briefs for its existing brands across different geographies, asking relevant companies to apply to solve a specific business problem. As of July 2014, five Collider startups had signed revenue-generating deals with Unilever brands.

Specialism: Looking at areas including cloud services, financial services, M2M, digital security, e-health, mobile applications, social networks and e-learning Length of programme: Nine months Funding structure: up to $50,000 for 10 per cent equity, with $23m already invested Projects: Wayra has accelerated nearly 450 companies across 20 different industries, which have gone on to raise more than $70m from other sources. 80 of the programme’s alumni are now working with Telefónica in selling, pilots or trials.

Founded: March 2014 Specialism: Retail technology accelerator with dedicated space within the Level39 fintech hub at Canary Wharf Length of programme: 15 weeks Funding structure: £12,500 investment for 4 per cent equity. The winner of the JLAB programme receives up to £100,000

John Vary, John Lewis Samsung Accelerator

Telefónica Wayra Founded: 2011, March 2012 in the UK, totalling 14 established across Latin America and Europe

Founded: California in June 2013, now operating across seven countries including China, India and Israel Specialism: From coding to gaming, advertising to online dating, Microsoft is simply looking for great ideas and skilled teams Length of programme: Three months Funding structure: London applicants receive up to £75,000 prior to entering the programme. Microsoft takes no equity and offers free workspace, mentoring and access to its business ecosystem

“WE HAVE BEEN AHEAD OF THE GAME IN OMNICHANNEL RETAILING AND OUR JLAB INCUBATOR WAS DESIGNED TO HELP NURTURE THE NEXT GENERATION OF TECHNOLOGY STARTUPS, WHILE HELPING ENSURE WE REMAIN ON THE CUTTING-EDGE OF RETAIL CHANGE”

John Lewis JLAB

investment and a chance to supply John Lewis Projects: Five projects made it into JLAB in 2014, giving them access to John Lewis’ retail infrastructure, plus internal and external mentors. Location-based tech provider Localz, which uses iBeacons to send relevant information to smartphone users while shopping, won the first JLAB.

Microsoft Ventures UK

Founded: July 2013 in California, September 2013 in New York Specialism: Looking for products and services that can enrich the lives of consumers. The startups do not have to make their products exclusively for Samsung Length of programme: There is no fixed duration Funding structure: There is no fixed amount. “We understand each product has different timelines and resource requirements, and we work closely with our entrepreneurs to determine what they need to succeed,” Samsung says Projects: Samsung does not have an application process or deadline, instead offering experienced entrepreneurs the opportunity to approach them with their idea. The programme has kicked off in the US, where all of its current projects are in stealth mode, with a goal of getting them to market within one-to-three years.

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Projects: Globally, 80 per cent of the 240 graduates across seven accelerators have raised an average of $1.9m in funding within one year of finishing the programme. London-based alumni Caribu got a mention during Apple’s recent keynote event.

Nike+ Fuel Lab Founded: April 2014 Specialism: Builds on the work done through the 2013 Nike+ Accelerator program, developing digital services for the 28m-plus people that use FuelBand, plus expanding its audience by partnering with companies like MyFitnessPal Length of programme: 12 weeks Funding structure: $50,000 per team Projects: Although the company announced after 18 months it would stop selling its FuelBand fitness hardware, it continues to work on the software ecosystem. It’s not clear where the project has got to.

MARCH 2015

View from the inside

John Vary, IT innovation manager at John Lewis, explains the thinking behind JLAB

“As part of our 150th anniversary celebrations last year, we launched our first ever technology incubator, JLAB,” says John Vary, IT innovation manager at John Lewis. “We have been ahead of the game in omnichannel retailing and our JLAB incubator was designed to help nurture the next generation of technology startups, while helping ensure we remain on the cutting-edge of retail change. “We had five finalists but the overall winner was Localz, a

startup business specialising in micro-location technology. Their technology gives customers the opportunity to take advantage of some enhanced services using their smartphone based on their precise location. “For example, it could automatically offer to trigger a customer’s Click & Collect order to be picked as they enter the shop. We’re going to start trialing this solution very soon before rolling it out more widely if it’s successful.”

ANALYSIS

It’s the taking part that counts Life within Wayra, according to Daniel Reina, CEO and co-founder of Tappx “We chose Wayra because they are a global accelerator with offices around the world with an excellent reputation,” says Daniel Reina, CEO and co-founder of app discovery startup Tappx. “They offer investment support, offices, metrics, mentors, legal and financial support, and internships. You also benefit from a close working partnership with Telefónica, and a wide network of advisors. It was a strategic decision for us – mobile app discovery is a global market and we needed a global partner.

“You have to be able to juggle multiple things at the same time, pitch at a moment’s notice and do a lot of networking. Being part of an accelerator means you have more work and responsibilities to meet the expectations of those supporting you. In return, you have a wider network, which is an invaluable resource for a company that needs to grow rapidly, but you are always busy and need to work hard. We also learn from the other companies participating in the programme, it’s its own intensive MBA.”

What else is out there? The corporate accelerator isn’t right for everyone – here are some alternative approaches… The Pop Up Agency “We solve briefs in 48 hours,” says Zlatko Corluka, co-founder of The Pop Up Agency, which came out of work done by the team at career accelerator Hyper Island. “The client is not expecting a fully functioning app or a website after this

Good old fashioned Post-It notes at The Pop Up Agency

time, but something that you can start implementing or producing the next day. “Innovation is almost always the factor and they often come to us

to try new ways of working. We could be called in to accelerate a project, to think of new markets for an existing product, to create or launch a new product, and much more. Before settling down in London, we did a world tour where we worked with everyone from Facebook to CocaCola, and some startups in Berlin. From this we got great knowledge of how different markets and industries around the world work, something that clients really appreciate. “Often our clients already have one or more agencies working on their communications, but they’re not always happy with what they get. From what we have seen and heard, the value of the end product doesn’t match the time and money spent on it.”

EY Startup Challenge Some large companies, such as Ernst & Young, have opted to create short

competitions in order for them to engage with startups around a specific business problem, in this case, the ‘right to be forgotten’. Sedicii has developed and patented a technology that eliminates the transmission, storage and exposure of private user data during identity verification. They won the six-week EY Startup Challenge from a shortlist of seven tech startups. “We wanted to work with EY because they are focused on delivering real commercial outcomes for their customers that use new innovations that startups can provide,” says Sedicii’s global commercial director Richard Coady. “From this programme and working with the EY team, Sedicii benefited from having access to and engaging with EY clients in verifying our solutions and introducing them to our innovative technologies.”

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COMMENT

MARCH 2015

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MARCH 2015

COMMENT

THE DISRUPTORS Kirsty Styles looks at the latest crop of innovative apps and mobile services vying for consumer and advertiser attention he mobile industry hasn’t quite yet delivered on the whole new world it promised – instead the focus seems to be on delivering, or perfecting, innovations we’ve all been talking about for years already. With sales halted on the current version of Google Glass, plus wearables like Nike FuelBand consigned to the scrap heap, it’s clear that smart-device makers are doing some soul-searching. Despite several launches at CES, Apple’s iWatch (due this spring) is just about the only wearable on everyone’s mind.

of Wit.ai, which could accelerate voicecontrolled functionality in the social giant’s products. Facebook’s enterprise efforts are also a hot tip for 2015, if businesses are willing to part with their data of course. Behind the scenes, Qualcomm has been working to improve the processing power of our smartphones, and its Snapdragon 810 is now coming into production in Windows and Android devices such as the LG G Flex 2. This means better data speeds, longer battery life and optimised support of 4K video. And this is perfect timing for what’s becoming an all-video culture, with visual

Speed reading However, the Uno Noteband is worth checking out. The device, which has just completed a successful crowdfund on Indiegogo, comes pre-loaded with Spritz fast-reading software. Spritz promises to help you read a 300-page book in 90 minutes, by showing you one word at a time in the same place on-screen – eradicating the eyemovement required to read a line of text. This might be the key to keeping your New Year’s resolution to read more books. Another new app, Bond, could help you keep your promises of regular contact with family and friends. Bond lets you set regular reminders to reach out to certain people, on whichever platform they prefer. Meanwhile, the handset market is still pretty hot, with Chinese upstart Xiaomi sealing its position as the world’s third-largest handset maker, and rousing investment rumours from the likes of Facebook. Xiaomi, founded in 2010, has just unveiled a couple of handsome handsets that are shorter, thinner, lighter and cheaper than the iPhone 6 Plus. Although failing in its bid to get a slice of the Chinese device market, Facebook has made an interesting acquisition in the form

The Uno Noteband comes pre-loaded with software that promises to help you read a 300-page book in 90 minutes

feasting set to represent 79 per cent of all consumer internet traffic in 2018, up from 66 per cent in 2013. Everyone from Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, Instagram and Vice are vying for your attention in this space, so prepare for the definition of TV, the ad spend, and the metrics to change dramatically.

Virtual reality And where would video be without, next-gen video (virtual reality)? Gamers are clearly the big winners in the growth of VR, and mobile games are already tipped to outsell consoles this year. But advertisers, too, will

start to make virtual reality pay. Although the Tesco store walkaround was pretty awkward, companies like Chrysler are turning a ‘behind the scenes at the factory’ pitch into a truly cinematic experience, with the help of Google Maps and Oculus Rift, and now there’s Microsoft’s Hololens to get excited about (see p.36).

Eye tests And where there’s ‘bells and whistles’ tech, there’s also a real drive to create the products and services that help every day. Covering everything from assistive technologies for people with disabilities, to ‘quantified self’ applications, 2015 is surely the year that health products, and health data, hit the big time. In Berlin, MiMi is using smartphones to make hearing aid technologies accessible to all. Peak Vision is likewise bringing cheap eye tests to the developing world via its smartphone app. Bigger data is also helping smart city innovation trickle down to smart towns. MK:Smart is a £16m project currently smartening up Milton Keynes, proving that smart city projects can be done on a smaller scale. The company behind this was just bought up by Huawei, while Samsung Ventures has invested in London-based IoT startup Everythng, so it’s certainly a battleground to watch going into 2015. Keep an eye on eye-tracking and facial-recognition, long-tipped to come into mainstream usage, plus even more mobile-first product customisation, such as that just announced at BBC News. Mobile money, again led by Apple, is also likely to become ‘just another thing we do’ come 2016. But don’t think about that now – there’s a whole year of improvement and iteration to do first. MM

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COVER STORY

MARCH 2015

OPEN FOR Mobile BUSINESS Martin Price, VP Product at OpenX, tells David Murphy how the company is advancing the art of programmatic advertising for mobile he history of OpenX dates back to 2008, when it started out as an ad serving company – it was a UK startup that migrated to Southern California with considerable success. So much so, in fact, that today it is recognised as one of the leading programmatic exchanges both Stateside and in the UK. And mobile is an increasingly important part of its global platform. While the ad serving business is still an integral part of the OpenX platform, it is its real-time ad exchange and SSP (Supply Side Platform) that are now its core offerings. The company works with more than 1,000 publishers and advertisers around the world serving billions of ad impressions a month. Of note, the number of monthly impressions served is second only to Google. OpenX Mobile, which includes mobile web publishers, app developers and buyers, is the fastest growth area for the company.

Innovation and efficiency OpenX’s partners have been attracted by an approach built on innovation and efficiency. “There’s a lot of hype right now around programmatic, and a lot of excitement about the supposed efficiencies that it brings to the business of digital advertising, compared to the old way of doing things,” says OpenX VP product, Martin Price. “However, some of the process that drive programmatic are themselves pretty inefficient.” One of these is the way that the auction process is typically conducted, as Price explains. “The problem with the auction process is that it is somewhat siloed between the real-time bidding and network

worlds,” he says. “In the ‘waterfall’ model, if the highest bid for an impression comes from an ad network, but then the network refuses the impression, it is passed down to the next highest bid in the ad network stack. In the worst-case scenario, if each subsequent ad network refuses the impression, the price keeps dropping and dropping and the publisher makes less money. This happens even if there was an advertiser willing to pay more for that impression in a real-time auction, because the waterfall model cannot accommodate the real-time and the ad network stacks in a unified way. “One of the benefits of OpenX is the level of transparency our mobile ad exchange offers buyers. In a mobile-first world where cookies are less prevalent, the amount of data passed between an exchange and to buyers makes a big difference to the buying-decision process. “We focus on providing greater transparency in terms of mobile data signals to enable our publishers to optimise their performance more effectively.”

Demand Fusion OpenX solves the problem of fractured demand with its groundbreaking Demand Fusion technology, which fuses real-time bidding and ad network demand into a single, unified auction. So in the previous scenario, if the highest bid comes from an ad network, which then refuses the impression, and the next highest bid comes from the real-time auction, the real-time bid will win the impression. The effect of this for the publisher is to drive up the price and maximise the yield by increasing

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competition for the impression, while at the same time opening up access to more impressions for advertisers. OpenX’s SSP solution launched in June last year with

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COVER STORY

Native ads are great for driving app installs

YP, TVGuide.com and New York Observer on board as early customers. Having successfully launched Demand Fusion for web and mobile web inventory, OpenX’s next move is to bring it to the world of in-app advertising which it hopes to do by the end of the second quarter. To that end, OpenX is launching a limited beta with selected app publishers, offering a more sophisticated, data-driven way to optimise yield for their in-app inventory. “The app ecosystem has fundamentally

“WE BELIEVE IN ENABLING ADVERTISING FORMATS THAT FIT BETTER WITH THE

experience for publishers and advertisers alike. For the first time, publishers can optimise their performance with minimal manual configuration, while advertisers get access to the maximum number of impressions available in real time.

User experience In addition to efficiency and transparency, OpenX is also committed to improving the user experience. “We believe in enabling advertising formats that fit better with the user experience and that can be bought and sold programmatically,” says Price. “A low-resolution 320 x 50 banner is not going to deliver the greatest experience on a 1080p high-definition mobile device, so we are committed to introducing more ad units that are more engaging and innovative, and also non-intrusive.” An example of this is the OpenX Native

USER EXPERIENCE AND THAT CAN BE BOUGHT AND SOLD PROGRAMMATICALLY” different characteristics and challenges – including differences in integration types such as SDKs and APIs; multiple ad formats, such as native and interstitials; and diverse data signals required by buyers. As a result, we reimagined the best way to monetise inventory for our in-app SSP product from the ground up,” says Price. OpenX’s new in-app SSP solution leverages its proprietary Demand Fusion technology to enable an optimised

OpenX brought native to the programmatic table with the launch of its Native Ad Exchange in 2014

Ad Exchange that the company launched at last year’s Mobile World Congress. This first global, Real-Time Bidding (RTB) exchange specifically for mobile-first native ads increases access to native, programmatic in-app inventory for advertisers, while giving publishers greater control over the type of ads they can offer – making it easier for them to deploy native ads at scale. The native exchange includes a native video ad unit that developers can run in feed, but with the sound turned off, leaving it to the consumer to decide whether to ignore or engage with the ad, without intruding on what they were doing. Also during 2014, OpenX re-engineered its SDK to facilitate a number of additional ad units on mobile, including pre-, mid- and post-roll video, interstitial video, and the native in-feed video ads, delivered through OpenX’s own video player (but also with extensive support for publishers’ own custom video players). “In the future,” says Price, “OpenX wants to bring the same sort of creativity and innovation in ad units to new devices and form factors, including connected TVs, wearables, and the myriad other appliances that will make up the Internet of Things. “It’s only by listening to the needs of our advertiser and publisher communities that we can develop our platform in a way that will help publishers monetise and advertisers reach consumers with more relevant messaging. Programmatic has the potential to revolutionise digital advertising – we see our role as ensuring that it fulfils that potential.” MM Meet the OpenX team at Mobile World Congress 2015 – you’ll find the company in Hall 8.1, Stand J31

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

THE NEW TELEVISION? Alex Spencer looks at the seemingly inexorable rise of mobile video advertising

t’s hard to ignore the rapid growth of video marketing on mobile over the past year or so. According to the IAB and PwC, ad spend on mobile video in the UK nearly tripled in the first half of 2014 to £63.9m, making it the single fastest growing digital ad format. Looking ahead, Forrester predicts that online video ad spend in Europe will grow at a CAGR of 20 per cent between now and 2019. Unsurprisingly, many of mobile advertising’s biggest names have followed suit. Last November, Mark Zuckerberg announced: “In five years, most of Facebook will be video,” and 2014 saw major video acquisitions by Facebook (LiveRail), Yahoo (BrightRoll) and Google (mDialog). This year, Google has introduced viewability reporting to its video campaigns for the first time, and

announced completion rates of up to 74 per cent on its premium video marketplace, Partner Select. The exact reason this growth is happening now depends entirely on who you ask. From the consumer’s perspective, it’s mainly a case of mobile video becoming a viable option, according to Forrester’s principal analyst, Thomas Husson. “The basic drivers are now in place for people to spend time watching video and TV on their smartphone: 4G, data bundles, much more mobile-friendly content,” he says. As for publishers, says Husson, it’s primarily due to the higher CPMs offered by video. “It’s a new way to monetise increasingly mobile audiences, rather than relying on static banners that are forced to fit on a small screen.”

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And for the advertisers themselves? According to Claire Valoti, UK head of agency relations at Facebook, it’s all about video’s ability to tell a story. “Video allows for much richer storytelling, combining sight, sound and motion, and providing a bigger canvas for brand-building, emotional resonance and loyalty,” Valoti says.

Commercial break There is another potential reason for the rise of video marketing: familiarity. “Video is actually easier for brands to get their heads around,” says Zac Pinkham, MD of mobile ad platform Millennial Media. “If they’ve not done mobile before and you start talking to them about rich media units and interstitials and swipe, they can get a bit lost. But all

MARCH 2015

says Millennial’s Pinkham. “They’ve already got those assets, so it’s not like they need to build a load of new creative.” But mobile is a different environment to TV – not least because the majority of content being presented isn’t video, which can lead to users being put off by auto-playing ads (see ‘Is mobile video an auto turn-off?’, p22). Besides, does a piece of creative designed to grab the attention of someone sat on a sofa on the other side of their living room really work for a commuter craning over a 6-inch screen on the top deck of a crowded bus? “The underlying creative asset, whether it’s 15 or 30 seconds or some longer form, I think works,” says Schiller. “What digital ads offer is the ability to reach the widest variety of users across devices, whether they’re on

“WE’VE SEEN A GROWTH IN DEMAND FOR SNACKABLE, BITESIZE CONTENT ON MOBILE AND HAVE STARTED TO CREATE CONTENT SPECIFICALLY FOR THE PLATFORM” DAVID AMODIO, CHANNEL 4

major brands have been creating video assets since the advent of TV.” Jay Schiller, senior director of video advertising at Microsoft, agrees. “Buying an ad that shows in front of a video or as an interstitial is essentially like a commercial break on TV,” he says. “That’s where most advertisers’ comfort zone is. “For now the critical mass of spend on digital video is very much coming from the big TV spenders. They already have the creative and have made the investment, they are very focused on reaching users with that same message regardless of what device they’re on.”

ANALYSIS

their smartphone during their commute or on the go at weekends, on their desktop during the workday, or on the Xbox at night.” “TV advertisers already understand how to tell great stories using video,” agrees Pinkham. “What we bring is the ability to reach the right people and then add interactivity over the top.” This might mean taking a beer commercial and overlaying it with a map that shows where the viewer’s nearest pub is, or adding browsable hotspots to an ad for a car that enables viewers to explore individual components in more depth. “We encourage people to always incorporate these elements in their video ads, and make it a ‘lean forwards’ experience rather than ‘lean back’,” says Pinkham. “The great thing for FMCG brands in particular is that this means the video ads can link straight through to purchase.” Channel 4 is one publisher currently leveraging this kind of interactivity, having brought its iVOD interactive ad formats to mobile for the first time last year. For now, the broadcaster offers only a limited selection of the units available on desktop, restricted to the 4OD iOS app, though this is being expanded as time goes on. One of the most recently introduced formats is Ad Elect – first launched on desktop in 2011 – which gives viewers the chance to choose from a small selection of creatives from the same advertiser, to better suit their interests.

Major focus Smartphones and tablets together make up around a quarter of traffic to 4OD but, vitally, half of the service’s 11m-strong database of registered users signed up on mobile.

Different environment “If you’re just translating the TV content onto mobile then that’s very easy for brands,”

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

Is mobile video an auto turn-off? A recent Frank N. Magid Associates study found that 20 per cent of 13-17 year olds, and 25 per cent of 18-24s, said they will spend less time on Facebook as a result of video ads appearing in their feeds, reporting that they found them too “disruptive” and “repetitive”. So, is the use of video advertising simply too intrusive for the average mobile user? “Not if the ad is personalised and relevant,” says Facebook’s Claire Valoti. “In fact, we’re increasingly seeing a shift towards visual content on Facebook, especially with video.” This is undeniable – the number of videos posted by each Facebook user has risen 75 per cent in the past year, and in the UK, over 50 per cent of Facebook users watch a video every day. On the other hand, these videos aren’t necessarily marketing content. A recent study commissioned by Channel 4, which used eye-tracking glasses to measure peoples’ interest in ads, showed that on platforms that offer more short-form advertising content, users spend a lot of time looking away from the screen as the ads played, and then would look back again when the content they were actually looking for came on. “Our belief is that within a broadcast environment, whether it’s on a smartphone or tablet or TV, people are actively looking for content,” says Channel 4’s David Amodio. “You’re in the right mindset, so you tend to sit down and actually enjoy the ads. Whereas, in an environment where you’re not expecting to see video ads, they can be annoying.” This is exacerbated by ads that begin automatically, without any input from the user. “We’ve seen a lot of pushback on that,” says Microsoft’s Jay Schiller. “But

there’s a certain grey area in the definition of auto-play. If the user is expecting the video to start, even if it starts automatically, the user is much more willing to watch it. If you don’t have any identifier, or if the video just pops up and starts playing without any warning, then that can be too disruptive.” Ad standards are already addressing this issue, however, and as with any advertising, users’ interest – and the resulting effectiveness of the ad – hinges on the content itself. “The key is not thinking purely in terms of advertising,” says Forrester’s Thomas Husson. “Increasingly, mobile is about utility marketing and delivering services and information to the consumer in their moment of need. That could take the form of a traditional video ad – but if you just get pushed a reused TV spot, it’s unlikely to be what you’re actually looking for. There are much more creative ways to make video work on mobile, such as a tutorial or how-to video.” Microsoft’s Jay Schiller

“Our viewers tend to skew a little younger than other broadcasters, so mobile is a major focus for us, especially as a future planning piece,” says Channel 4 digital and creative lead David Amodio. “We’ve seen a growth in demand for snackable, bite-size content on mobile and have started to create content specifically for the platform.” This has led to the creation of ‘Shorts’, a set of original videos each less than four

minutes long, exclusively produced for 4OD. Channel 4 uses the shorts as a testing ground for new talent, and to promote its existing programmes with added content and ‘Best Bits’ highlights. Fascinatingly, though, Amodio tells us “it’s the branded content that has actually produced the highest numbers”. The broadcaster has partnered with three brands on its 4OD-exclusive content marketing: British Gas, Rimmel and Alfa

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Romeo. The last of these has been the most successful so far, with the resulting Guy Martin’s Passion for Life series commissioned as a full 30-minute show which aired on the channel last December. This kind of digital-exclusive content seems like the way forward for advertisers who want to make the most of mobile video, and it’s proved especially popular on social networks like YouTube, Twitter’s short-video platform Vine, and Facebook.

MARCH 2015

ANALYSIS

Four of the top 10 global trending videos on YouTube in 2014s were ads from (L-R) Nike, Budweiser, clothing company Wren and the 20th Century Fox film Devil’s Due

“Whether you’re a global brand, a journalist in the field or a public figure sharing a part of your life, posting raw videos that are compelling, shareable clips that no one else will have is the best way to reach your audience,” says Facebook’s Valoti. “Creative content is king on Facebook, so our Creative Shop team collaborates with agencies and brands to help them develop content that is every bit as useful, powerful and engaging as the content people already see from friends and family in their News Feed.” Valoti points to Lucozade’s ‘Conditions Zone’ campaign, which ran on Facebook during the World Cup, as an example of this creative approach. The ads recreated Brazil’s weather conditions on a five-a-side pitch in London and used Lucozade’s football talent, including Liverpool and England star Steven Gerrard, to showcase the impact of heat and humidity on performance. The ads were delivered across mobile and desktop, to 16-34 year old males with football-related interests, as well as anyone talking about football-related content on Facebook. With a reach of 4.1m people, the video attracted 1.3m views – a view is registered only when the video remains

on the user’s screen for longer than three seconds – and contributed to a 12 per cent increase in sales for Lucozade over the period. “Digital video gives advertisers the opportunity to do something that always proved very difficult on TV: to more accurately measure interaction, engagement and, ultimately, conversion,” says Valoti. “We are able to observe behaviours, track conversion and accurately marry up people’s behaviour with their ultimate purchase.”

Rapid growth So given the rapid growth in digital video consumption, could it potentially dethrone

“THERE’S A BIG OPPORTUNITY FOR BRANDS TO USE DIGITAL VIDEO CONTENT TO COMPLEMENT AND AMPLIFY THEIR TV CAMPAIGNS” When Snapchat introduced ads to its messaging app in 2014, it went straight for video. The very first ad was for a 20-second trailer for Universal Pictures movie Ouija

CLAIRE VALOTI, FACEBOOK

the traditional king of media? According to the Standard Media Index (SMI), US TV spend dropped by 2 per cent year-on-year in Q4 2014, and by as much as 9 per cent between October 2013 and 2014. With spend on mobile video surging, it’s possible that it is cannibalising some of TV’s market share. “There is a strong relationship between lower TV ratings and associated ad dollars and the dramatic increase in mobile advertising,” says SMI chief commercial officer James Fennessy. “Advertisers need to find new ways to reach the 18-34 demographic, since the fact is that they watch a lot less linear TV than their parents did. However, Fennessy says, there is still as much – if not more – appetite from these younger audiences for quality content, and as long as TV broadcasters continue to produce programmes like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, they’ll stay ahead of their digital equivalents. What’s more, the advent of online streaming has helped them reach entirely new audiences. “Mobile definitely complements and expands traditional TV’s reach and producers of high-quality content are in a terrific position to capitalise on this market dynamic,” he says. “We’re not suggesting digital video replaces TV ads,” Valoti agrees. “Rather, there’s a big opportunity for brands to use digital video content to complement and amplify their TV campaigns around the clock.” As the old maxim goes, no one was ever fired for buying ads on prime-time TV – and that looks likely to hold true for the foreseeable future. But with ad formats, creative and the supporting tech all evolving at a rapid pace, perhaps we’re not too far away from the day when the same can be said about a well-placed video ad on mobile. MM

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

With the UK General Election approaching, Kirsty Styles looks at efforts being made around the world to introduce mobile and digital voting

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MARCH 2015

ANALYSIS

Harper Reed was CTO for Barack Obama’s election campaign

“HARPER REED WAS CERTAINLY AN UNUSUAL SUSPECT WHEN HE WAS APPOINTED CTO FOR OBAMA’S CAMPAIGN, HEADING INTO THE OVAL OFFICE”

anuary 2015 saw the celebration of Democracy Day here in the UK, this year marking the 750th anniversary of the country’s first parliament. It was perhaps not an occasion up there with Christmas. The month also saw anti-austerity party Syriza win a majority in Greece’s parliament, on the promise of a renegotiation of public debt obligations that many believe are crippling the country’s economic recovery. So it was quite the month for democracy, even if it passed many in the politically disengaged British public by. The UK will be holding its own public vote in May, with some billing it the ‘lottery

election’ because of the colourful range of parties that are in a real position to win seats this time. The Independent has narrowed the race down to just 100 key marginals, noting that Labour is likely to face fierce competition from the Scottish National Party, while the Lib Dems are in danger of dropping from a haul of 57 seats last time around to just 19 in 2015. Just as the political race has been thrown a little more wide open, the digital world has come a long way since we voted back in 2010, and no doubt contributing to the loosening grip of the ‘big two’ parties. But, despite near-peak smartphone penetration in the UK, policymakers are still yet to give the green light to online, or better yet, mobile voting.

Internet voting In true, lumbering bureaucracy fashion, two different groups in parliament have been consulting simultaneously on proposals around a ‘digital democracy’. Speaker John Bercow’s Digital Democracy Commission has just produced its report, stating that internet voting could be online in time for the 2020 general election, while also noting that parliamentary language and procedures will need to be simplified by then if we have any hope that “everyone can understand what the House of Commons does”.

Cabinet Office minister Sam Gyimah says: “The fact electronic voting is incredibly rare across the globe I believe is testament to some of the problems delivering it.” But Anthony Walker, deputy CEO of Tech UK says: “We are confident the tools exist to address these challenges.” It’s something that’s been a reality in Estonia for a decade – in 2005, Estonia became the first country worldwide to offer legally binding online votes in a national election. The number casting their vote in this way has risen from just under 10,000 people first time around, to a third of the population practising digital democracy in last year’s European elections.

Voter engagemnet The UK’s Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has likewise just finished accepting submissions on voter engagement, covering proposals including automatic registration, online voting and votes at 16. The former should be of particular interest to those who want more tech solutions in powerful places, given that moves by the Government Digital Service, tasked with transforming the British state for the 21st Century, has tried to streamline voter registration and knocked almost 1m off the register in the process. The Labour Party published its Digital Government report in November last year, calling for a digital government infrastructure that’s accessible to all. It cited figures from BT estimating that internet access means an equivalent extra £1,064 every year for each new user. But the study points out that while the less well off are less likely to be online, 80 per cent of government interactions are with the poorest 25 per cent of people. A new model for digital democracy is shaping up in the form of DemocracyOS, a cross-platform, open-source tool for debating and voting that’s being developed by a group of young professionals in Argentina. Its creators explain it like this:

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

“The internet has changed everything: the way we share and consume culture, how we engage in commerce, and how we communicate with others. But the internet has failed to change in one key area of our lives: politics. Democracy is in great need of a serious upgrade.” Having already appeared as part of a TED talk, and been demoed in front of the World Economic Forum, the project is about to be crowdfunded (of course) via a Kickstarter campaign. The vision is that voters will be given the opportunity to express their preferences on any given issue, directly to their elected representative, with the hope this will increase engagement with politics, and accountability of decision-makers. Elsewhere in the world, and postfinancial crash, the Icelandic public was given the opportunity to take part in drafting a crowdsourced constitution. The 10-month process saw an elected 25-member Constitutional Advisory Council seek feedback through social media sites before drafting the new document. But the effort ultimately failed in the country’s legislature, despite huge public support. In Seattle,

Labour’s NHS Baby campaign struck a strong social media chord with would-be voters

meanwhile, an online game was used to challenge residents to pick funding priorities in order to close a very real $31.7m gap in the city’s 2013 budget.

Big data So if we aren’t going to have a digitally-enabled election in the UK this time, how are the campaigns shaping up? It’s Barack Obama’s 2012 election campaign that usually springs to mind when considering great digital election campaigning. Harper Reed was certainly an unusual suspect when he was appointed CTO for the campaign, heading into the Oval Office with a beard and thick-rimmed glasses that you’d be more likely to find in Shoreditch than in the White House. But the victory won here is among the greatest examples the world has ever seen of big data being made genuinely useful,

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and much credit is given to the tech tools deployed during the race. Going into 2015, and despite bringing in ‘the wizard of Oz’ – Australian electoral guru Lynton Crosby on a £500,000 deal to secure electoral victory – the Conservative Party looks to be running more of a bad data campaign than a big data one. The Spectator reports that the party is running two ‘rickety’ databases simultaneously in the run up to the May vote, VoteSource and Merlin, but points out this isn’t a new issue, with one campaigner admitting they “called quite a lot of dead people” in 2013’s Eastleigh by-election. In contrast, Labour Digital, a young team of Labour supporters working in tech who “want Labour to be number one in digital” has been called the party’s “most powerful weapon”. They created last year’s NHS Baby campaign, a minimally-party-branded tool that created lots of socially shareable nostalgia – I was the 25,484,298th baby born on the NHS – while harvesting email addresses in the process. The cost-efficiency and democratic access that comes with digital campaigning has not gone unnoticed by the smaller parties. “Digital means a level playing field,” says UKIP’s Conservative defector Douglas Carswell. “Almost anything the big corporate parties do on massive central databases can now be done on a £600 laptop. With a good desktop publishing programme and an army

MARCH 2015

of volunteers, you can compete on equal terms with the Westminster machines.” The Green Party has also embraced this digital do-it-yourself spirit – the ‘Reasons to Vote Green’ website, knocked up by a techsavvy volunteer, has seen more than 42,000 shares on Facebook.

have attempted to wipe all of their pre-2010 speeches off the internet. So we’ve dug them out,” said the website’s political editor Jim Waterson. Many sites, such as VoteforPolicies. org, have sprung up just to cater for people who just wants to know who to plump for. Unfortunately for the political parties, the

“MANY MODERN CITIZENS ARE MAKING THEIR DECISION AHEAD OF THE MAY VOTE AND WILL BE EXPECTING AN ONLINE EXPERIENCE COMPARABLE WITH AIRBNB OR NETFLIX” Old news

world won’t wait. The challenges now facing In the past, The Sun was confident enough political parties are the same as those being of its own power to influence the election tackled by legacy brands: when people can debate that it printed the famed ‘It’s the Sun make a one-click purchase on Amazon, why wot won it’ front page (left) following the would they use a specialist shop’s site? And Conservative victory in 1992. But the most although none of the parties have so far fallen heated discussions around the election so foul of data leaks or breaches, given that far have been centred on the TV debate: will discs containing information from three they, won’t they? If they do, who will appear? And perhaps it’s the chatter happening around these TV spots that will make the biggest difference this time round. It’s still not quite clear whether Facebook ‘likes’ actually turn into votes; I know I follow UKIP on Twitter, but only so I know what they’re up to. But FremantleMedia’s Keith Hindle recently told The Guardian that the level of social engagement its TV shows @Ed_Miliband - 374k drive is now more important to advertisers than TV ratings. Twitter has taken this opportunity to start @uklabour - 172k opening up and highlighting tools that could help political parties make an impact in target seats, including geo-targeting around individual postcodes. “This is potentially even more important in 2015 when the role of the smartphone will come to the fore as a way of connecting with voters,” Twitter says on its blog. “Mobile is in Twitter’s DNA: of Twitter’s 15m UK users, 80 per cent access @thegreenparty 102k

ANALYSIS

sensitive police misconduct inquiries just got lost in the post, let’s not put it past them. Many modern citizens, some spurred into caring by the exponential growth of smaller parties such as the Green Party and UKIP, and some mobilised by events taking place in Greece and elsewhere, are now trying to make their decision ahead of the May vote, and will be expecting an online experience comparable with Airbnb or Netflix. They will be disappointed. But it’s not actually those digital-savvy consumers that are the people most likely to vote. Despite the cheeky antics and big conversations now made possible online, in the 2010 election, fewer than half (44 per cent) of 18 to 24 year olds cast a ballot, while that shot up to 76 per cent of over 65s. As well as focusing on policies that favour older people, this perhaps explains the reluctance from the major parties to move to online or mobile voting: if you make it easier, digital people might actually do democracy. And you wouldn’t want that now, would you? MM

Follow That – How the leading politicians and parties stack up on Twitter

the platform via their mobile device.” But, unlike newspapers, digital doesn’t become tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers: the internet doesn’t forgive or forget. David Cameron was mocked early in 2014 for “paying people to like him”, in the form of a paid Facebook campaign. The party was also called out on Buzzfeed for trying to delete from its website some of the promises made before the last election. “The Tories

@David_Cameron - 905k

@nick_clegg - 207k

@nigel_farage - 184k

@conservatives - 132K

@libdems - 79.6k @ukip - 79.2k @natalieben - 49.5k

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AWARDS

MARCH 2015

Celebrating Excellence

he winners of the 2014 Effective Mobile Marketing Awards were announced at a packed ceremony in London in late November. 300 executives representing brands, agencies and mobile marketing tech providers were in attendance, as host Spencer Kelly and Mobile Marketing editor David Murphy revealed the winners across 30 categories. The 5th annual Awards were sponsored by BlisMedia, Celtra, Digital Gurus, Millennial Media, StrikeAd and Theorem. They attracted more than 200 entries from brands and agencies across the globe, which were whittled down by the judging panel to a shortlist comprising only the very best, from which the winners were chosen. John Lewis, Unilever, Mothercare, Renault, Subway, Sony Pictures and IKEA were among the brands taking to the stage to pick up trophies, in recognition of their excellent work in the mobile channel. This year for the first time, the Awards also included four People’s Choice Awards, voted for by the industry from a shortlist drawn up by the Mobile Marketing team working with a panel of industry experts. The Effective Mobile Marketing Awards represent the very best the industry has to offer, and with every passing year the competition to win one of the Awards gets even tougher. We’ll be announcing the details and entry criteria for the 2015 Awards in the coming weeks. If you’re doing great work in mobile and want to showcase it to a global audience, stay tuned to mobilemarketingmagazine.com for the entry criteria and deadlines. In the meantime, here’s a roll call of all the 2014 winners…

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The 5th annual Effective Mobile Marketing Awards winners were announced late last year. Here’s a rundown of all the winners

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MARCH 2015

AWARDS

Effective Mobile Marketing Awards 2014 Roll of Honour Most Effective Advertising Network Winner: Millennial Media Highly Commended: LoopMe

Most Effective Advertising Technology Platform

Winner: Drawbridge Highly Commended: BlisMedia

Most Effective Mobile-First Service

Winner: Paym and The7Stars Highly Commended: Nimbletank – Soundjack

Most Effective App Or Site Building Platform

Winner: Future Platforms – Kirin

Most Effective Mobile Or Responsive Site

Winner: Ampersand – Harvey Nichols Making Luxury Mobile

Most Effective Consumer App

Winner: Mothercare and NN4M – Mothercare Android App Highly Commended: Future Workshops – The Open Championship

Most Effective Tablet App

Winner: Publicis-Blueprint – Vue Tablet App Highly Commended: iRiS Software Systems and Kempinski Hotels – iRiS Guest Valet

Most Effective Programmatic Buying Campaign

Winner: Tesco, Qriously and Initiative – £1 Delivery Vs. Click & Collect

Most Effective Native Advertising Campaign

Winner: Sony Pictures and Manning Gottlieb OMD – The Amazing Spider-Man 2/Draw Something Partnership

Most Effective Rich Media Campaign

Winner: Manning Gottlieb OMD & Mobile5 – Renault Zoe Locate and Personalise

Most Effective Use Of Video

Winner: Millennial Media – North Face Never Stop Exploring

Most Effective Social Campaign Winner: OMD UK – Celebrity Cruises #SmartSnaps

Most Effective Messaging Campaign

Winner: IKEA, IMImobile and LIDA – IKEA Family

Most Effective CRM Campaign Winner: CHS and Subway – Subcard

Most Effective Brand Campaign

Winner: John Lewis and Manning Gottlieb OMD – Christmas Bear and Hare

Most Effective Sales Promotion Campaign

Winner: Mindshare and Unilever – Walls Ice-Cream: Thermal Activated Media Highly Commended: IKEA, IMImobile and LIDA – IKEA Family

Most Effective Tablet Advertising Campaign

Winner: OMD UK and Coty UK – Rimmel London Rita Ora Colour Rush Collection

Most Effective Integrated Campaign

Most Effective Charity Campaign Or Solution

Winner: Cancer Research UK – Play To Cure: Genes In Space

Most Effective Financial Campaign Or Solution

Winner: Lloyds Banking Group – Lloyds Banking Mobile Banking

Most Effective Entertainment Campaign Or Solution

Winner: BT And Affiliate Window – BT Sport

Most Effective Travel & Tourism Campaign Or Solution

Winner: iRiS Software Systems and Kempinski Hotels – iRiS Guest Valet Highly Commended: Canal & River Trust – Readymade #WaterwayDays

Most Effective Retail Campaign Or Solution

Winner: IKEA, IMImobile And LIDA – IKEA Family Highly Commended: Smartfocus – Meadowhall Ladies’ Night

Most Effective Mobile Advertising Campaign

Winner: John Lewis and Manning Gottlieb OMD – Christmas Bear and Hare

Winner: OMD UK and Livity – NSPCC and Childline Zipit

People’s Choice Awards

Most Effective In-Store Initiative

Most Effective Agency

Winner: Cadbury’s And Hi Mum! Said Dad – Joy Box Highly Commended: OMD UK and McDonald’s UK – McFlurry Music Mix-Up

Most Effective Use Of Payment Technologies

Winner: Bango – The Bango Payment Platform

Winner: Mindshare

Most Effective Technology Provider Winner: Google

Most Effective Brand Winner: Uber

Mobile Marketer of the Year

Winner: James Chandler, global mobile director, Mindshare

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

SIM Cities Tim Maytom looks at the smart city initiatives, largely powered by mobile tech, springing up around the UK

he idea of the smart city has been increasingly in the news in the past few years. The same principles that enable us to connect to our homes and cars are being applied across large areas, and NFC tags and Bluetooth beacons are deployed in ever larger numbers to create a web of sensors covering our cities. But while an individual retailer, restaurant chain or car manufacturer can decide to deploy technology like this relatively easily, creating a smart city means balancing the concerns of citizens, multiple businesses, local authorities and technology providers, all while working within what are often much tighter budget controls, and with much stricter oversight. It’s easy to think of London as the be-all and end-all of tech development in England, but the size of the capital means that putting this kind of city-wide endeavour in place is challenging to say the least. Instead, some of Britain’s smaller cities have led the way in establishing smart city initiatives, serving as testing grounds for tomorrow’s technology. Cities including Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester have all been supported

“THE OPPORTUNITY TO DEVELOP NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR SMART CITIES IN THE UK IS MASSIVE” DAVID WILLETTS, MP

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by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ Smart City initiative, aimed at ensuring the UK is at the front of the pack in what is predicted to be a $40bn (£26.4bn) industry by 2020. The Technology Strategy Board has invested £50m in supporting businesses developing smart city technologies, and a further £24m in turning Glasgow into a ‘future cities demonstrator’ that integrates services across health, transport, energy and public safety to improve the local economy and quality of life for residents.

Massive opportunity “The opportunity to develop new technologies for smart cities in the UK is massive,” says MP David Willetts, former chair of the UK’s Smart Cities Forum. “We want to make sure that we are at the forefront of this digital revolution so we can stay ahead in the global race, designing new innovations in the UK and exporting them across the world. With around 80 per cent of the UK’s population living in cities, we need to ensure that they are fit for purpose in the digital age.”

MARCH 2015

ANALYSIS

Businesses and consumers in Norwich’s London Street have benefitted from the city’s experiments with mobile

“THE AIM OF THE SOLUTION IS TO CONNECT PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL ASSETS IN A WAY THAT WILL SURPRISE AND DELIGHT PEOPLE” MILES QUITMANN (BELOW-RIGHT), PROXAMA

Smaller, more commerce-focused smart city schemes have also been springing up. Liverpool deployed a series of Bluetooth beacons and launched a dedicated app aimed at enriching visitors’ experience of the city’s cultural and arts offerings, while the City of York Council teamed up with personalised entertainment company Appeartome to create an NFC-triggered app that brought the city’s rich history to life at 20 locations spread across a walking tour. Norwich is another city taking the smart city route. Here, the Business Improvement District (BID) has partnered with proximity marketing firm Proxama to create a beacon and app system designed to enrich the shopping experience for residents and visitors, and drive footfall for businesses in the city. “Over the last 10 years, we have seen the decline of the high street nationwide, although less so in Norwich than in other

places,” says Stefan Gurney, executive director of the Norwich BID. “We have to work harder to get people out of their homes and into physical shops. Something like the Connected High Street project – it’s the way the city has to be now.” The Norwich BID was formed just over two years ago by local businesses, with the aim of enhancing and promoting the local trading environment. It worked with Proxama to create a vision of a smart city solution that would aid its efforts, winning funding from the Technology Strategy Board as part of its ‘Re-imagine the High Street’ competition. The solution uses a wide range of proximity technologies, including Bluetooth beacons, NFC and QR codes, to connect to the free Loka app, developed by Proxama. The app, which works in conjunction with the Norwich BID’s existing Discover Norwich app, interacts

with the various proximity sensors to deliver updates, offers and notifications to residents and visitors. The project is the first of its kind to use beacons on buses, enabling the app to detect when users are travelling into the city centre, and provide them with information

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

to better plan their trip and take advantage of events within the city centre.

Surprise and delight

“RETAIL IS AT A TURNING POINT IN TERMS OF THE CONVERGENCE OF ON AND OFFLINE SHOPPING EXPERIENCES” MIKE POTTS, HAVAS MEDIA

“The aim of the solution is to connect physical and digital assets in a way that will surprise and delight people,” said Miles Quitmann, chief commercial officer for Proxama. “It’s about delivering the right message to people at the right time.” Establishing networks of sensors that can combine methods such as beacons, geo-fencing and NFC, creates a trail of information that businesses and local authorities can use to plan strategy and even inform policy. While many of these technologies have existed for several years, it’s only now that smart city initiatives are joining up the information they produce at greater scale. “Working with mobile technology is essential now,” says Gurney. “It’s the way we consume information, and we want the platform we’ve created to be able to support that conversation. Both businesses and consumers can benefit from a scheme like this – it adds value to both sides of the equation. People still want the experience, they want the city, but they also want the convenience that comes from a mobile phone.” There’s a lot of research to support the idea that in the future, shoppers will want to combine the digital and physical worlds in this way. A study by Webtrends found that 42 per cent of Britons want to receive real-time information and offers from retailers when they are in the vicinity, and of those, 11 per cent would like real-time reminders that direct them to items they previously searched for online.

shopping to out-of-city parks and park and rides, and less cars in towns as shoppers make use of ‘browse in-store, buy online’ technology.” 20 businesses in Norwich have so far signed up to the Loka solution. These include local retailers Castle Mall, Jarrolds and Pilch Sport, tourist attractions such as Norwich Castle, the Forum and Cinema

Norwich was always a “fine city”, now’s it’s smart too

City, and restaurants including The Library and Pinocchios. “I was very keen to trial the whole process,” says Jayne Raffles, director of Raffles Group, which runs several restaurants in Norwich. “Mobile gives us a way to reach a younger demographic who tend to use their smartphones to inform their decisions, and also enables us to promote to someone from out of town in a way other advertising can’t. “As a small business, we don’t have the income or expertise to set up a solution

Turning point “Retail is at a turning point in terms of the convergence of on and off-line shopping experiences,” says Mike Potts, chief data officer at Havas Media, which ran its own smart city project in Oxford to manage traffic and parking issues. “This is going to bring significant change to the make-up and use of cities. Expect more to be made of the road transport network in getting

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Local institution Jarrolds has embraced mobile

MARCH 2015

ANALYSIS

Norwich’s mobile revolution has taken in vendors at Norwich Market (above) and the Forum (below)

like this on our own. By working together as part of the BID, with support from Proxama, we’ve been able to deploy this new technology. It’s great to see Norwich embracing this sort of change, and I think that, thanks to schemes like this, there’s a vibrancy to the area that there wasn’t 10 years ago.” The funding provided by the Technology Strategy Board only allows for a six-month long pilot project, after which the scheme may move on to Phase Two, covering a much wider area of the city, and connecting more businesses from a wider variety of sectors, including Norwich City Football Club, galleries, theatres and the local authority.

High Street, it represents a permanent shift in how we operate within our city centres. “There’s a real appetite from retailers for this sort of technology,” says Gurney. “People are excited by the opportunities it offers. When we went to the businesses with the idea, it wasn’t a hard sell. Businesses are aware you need to be as smart as possible because the city is changing. I think it reflects the ethos of the city – bringing various vested interests together, drawn by a common goal that improves the lives of everyone.”

The initiative in Norwich is just one of many taking place across the country at the moment, as businesses, councils, developers and technology specialists work together to create a blueprint for the city of the future. The power that mobile phones have to connect and engage people is undeniable, and those responsible for our cities are waking up to the fact that if they want to reach people in the most effective manner, they need to build mobile into the core of how they operate. MM

Big plans Within the pilot period, the Norwich BID has big plans for how the solution can be used to engage both residents and visitors. The system was used as part of a Christmas tree trail over the festive period, with similar deployments planned for Norwich’s City of Ale festival, Easter egg hunts and the ‘GoGoDragons’ event, which will see 80 large painted sculptures of dragons, all equipped with beacons, placed around the city. The team behind the solution is confident that even if the smart city doesn’t receive the funding from Re-imagine the

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COMMENT

MARCH 2015

Redefining Premium on Mobile Rebecca Mahony, CMO of Teads, argues that high-end brands can find the inventory they need on mobile, if they are prepared to look beyond instream ad formats he word premium is perhaps the most overused word in marketing. Products ranging from food and drink to clothes and housing have all been described as ‘premium’ at one time or another. Advertising is not exempt – a quick search for ‘premium’ on Mobile Marketing’s website calls up 96 pages of results – that’s almost 1,000 articles. It’s a word that has been abused over the last 10 years, and its definition can include anything from professional content to blogs to video-sharing sites to, at the extreme end of the scale, anything that doesn’t constitute ‘adult’ content. But for brands, video advertising placements that are genuinely premium – and by premium they mean situated on wellrespected, well-known, professional sites – are hard to find and are often considered to be the Holy Grail of advertising. Their scarcity has forced many brands to carefully consider their video advertising campaigns as they fondly recall the relative risk-free nature of offline advertising.

Premium inventory The problem is not that genuine premium video advertising does not exist; it is down to its availability, or apparent lack thereof. Due to the industry’s preference for instream video advertising (ad formats that replicate the TV model and place video advertising before video content) the video ad sector suffers from a lack of premium video advertising inventory. Publishers often sell out of their instream video advertising inventory months in

advance, and are finding it difficult to dramatically increase the amount of inventory available, as it requires the production of additional video content. This lack of inventory leads brands to place their video advertising within less-thanpremium environments, causing concerns around brand safety. While the lack of premium video advertising inventory on desktop has been widely discussed, the equivalent situation is occurring on mobile. As investment in mobile video soars (up 196 per cent in H1 2014) the problem becomes the

“PREMIUM MOBILE SITES AND APPS SIMPLY DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH INVENTORY TO MEET DEMAND IF ONLY INSTREAM VIDEO FORMATS ARE USED” same – where and how should the video be delivered to consumers? Despite its popularity, mobile is a tricky medium to work with due to its excessive fragmentation. iOS or Android, smartphones, tablets or phablets, mobile web or in-app, are all considerations agencies and third parties need to bear in mind when planning their mobile video advertising campaigns. Typically, users split their time between apps and the mobile web. A survey put out last year by analytics company Flurry showed the average user in the US spends 22 minutes per day on mobile web and 2 hours and 42 minutes in-app. However,

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while apps seem to dominate the mobile web, it is important to remember that utilities make up a large percentage of time we spend in app – for example the top 10 apps downloaded last year included iTunes Radio, Instagram, Google+ and Facebook Messenger. Realistically, if brands wish to effectively target their audiences on multiple screens, then their video advertising should be delivered both on mobile web and in-app to ensure they can reach their entire audience. The issue then becomes how to find premium video advertising placements both on mobile web and in app.

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COMMENT

Teads’ inRead format sits within text, opens up when the user scrolls down, and only plays when in-view

Instream video

Outstream formats

On mobile web, the problem is similar to desktop. Video ads are mainly served using instream video formats, which severely limit the amount of premium inventory available; or using standard banner formats, which tend to be avoided by quality publishers as they can appear invasive. For in-app placements, the issue is different. Here, video advertising mainly takes the form of interstitials, where the user clicks on a certain part of the page and the video opens up in full screen. The problem here occurs because the vast majority of apps using these formats are gaming apps and the video views are often incentivised. For example, the user is told they will gain extra coins or lives if they watch a video. While this method is fine for some brands, the gaming environment is not appropriate for many brands with a high-end or luxury image. So how can brands capitalise on mobile video advertising without the risk of being placed within non-premium environments or primarily within gaming apps? The answer lies with the formats used to deliver the advertising. Premium mobile sites and apps simply do not have enough inventory to meet demand if only instream video formats are used, and as a result, distributors turn to mobile gaming apps. The solution is to grow the amount of inventory available on premium mobile sites and apps so that the supply of video advertising can meet demand.

In fact there is a simple way to make this a reality. Rather than relying on instream formats (which quickly run out of premium inventory) and then dropping down to tier two or three publishers or gaming apps, look to different distribution methods. Outstream

“OUTSTREAM VIDEO ADVERTISING FORMATS ENABLE HIGH-END BRANDS TO EMBRACE VIDEO ADVERTISING ON SMARTPHONES AND TABLETS, REASSURED THAT THEIR BRAND WILL NOT BE THROWN INTO QUESTIONABLE ENVIRONMENTS”

formats place video advertising outside the video stream, instead placing it within the heart of content, such as quality editorial. This enables truly premium quality publishers to open up their mobile apps and sites to video advertising, dramatically expanding the amount of inventory they can offer brands, while earning incremental revenues. These formats are typically popular with providers of professional content, as they fully complement the editorial experience. For example, Teads’ inRead format sits within text, opening up when the user scrolls down the page, playing only when in-view and seamlessly disappearing back into the page when the view is completed, or the user skips the ad. As users are never forced to watch the video advertising, the formats are seen as non-intrusive and uphold the premium nature of the publisher’s site to the benefit of high-end brands. By opening up huge quantities of premium mobile video inventory, these outstream video advertising formats enable high-end brands to embrace video advertising on smartphones and tablets, reassured that their brand will not be thrown into questionable environments and instead be carefully positioned within content that is truly premium. There is such a thing as premium video advertising inventory on mobile, the challenge is knowing exactly how and where to find it. MM

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

Reality Bites Tim Maytom considers the resurgence in interest in augmented and virtual reality and looks at the tech vying for consumers’ attention ithin the space of one week in January, Google shuffled its Glass project out of the spotlight, retiring the current model with no hint of when a replacement would materialise, while Microsoft added some dazzle to its Windows 10 announcement by unveiling the HoloLens. With so many major manufacturers now working on headsets for virtual reality, augmented reality and every other kind of reality you could ask for, has its time finally come?

HoloLens VR headsets have been in existence for over 50 years, and while we’ve come a long way from the first devices, which were so heavy

they had to be hung from the ceiling, the technology has never truly broken through. Microsoft’s HoloLens, a ‘mixed reality’ headset that projects holographic imagery over your surroundings, aims to break that trend. Using the holographic display, the device aims to blur virtual reality, augmented reality and the physical world in new ways, laying 3D graphics over real world objects. The HoloLens certainly made for an impressive presentation, but for the moment, we’ve had very little in the way of concrete

details about what we can expect from the Microsoft headset. The presentation at Microsoft’s Windows 10 launch split its time between consumer applications for the device (such as holographic TV screens, Skype video chats and games that transform living rooms into Minecraft landscapes), and enterprise solutions. The ability to model objects in holographic form before sending them to a 3D printer was one of the most impressive applications in the latter camp. However, much of the presentation was made up of pre-rendered videos about how transformative the technology would be, rather than any real insight into when we can expect to see it released, or how it will

of the public. For now, the critical consensus seems to echo the reception received by another of Microsoft’s ‘ground-breaking’ technologies: the Kinect. While the HoloLens may prove extremely useful in research, technical and enterprise

“AR AND VR HEADSETS ARE ALL ABOUT GETTING RID OF THE LAST BIT OF DISTANCE BETWEEN THE PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL WORLDS”

Our very own Alex Spencer tests the Oculus Rift (left), while Microsoft’s HoloLens (above) shows off its ‘mixed reality’ environments

work with existing hardware and software. One of the few solid details we did get was that NASA has been collaborating with Microsoft during HoloLens’ two-year development period and will be using it this summer to control rovers on Mars, which at least sells the technology’s space-age concept. We’ll have to wait for Microsoft’s developer conference, Build, at the end of April to find out more, and potentially get the first reports on what it’s like to experience the HoloLens from members

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Will Magic Leap be the technology that takes VR into toys?

environments, it’s unlikely that the technology will transform the life of the average consumer.

Oculus Rift While Microsoft is just entering the headset market, Facebook-owned Oculus has been operating there since 2012, when the prototype of its Rift VR headset was unveiled at E3. At CES 2015 at the start of this year, the company unveiled the latest iteration of its Rift device – the Crescent Bay – and outlined its plans for the immediate future.

MARCH 2015

ANALYSIS

Microsoft’s HoloLens (right) places virtual content over your view of the world (above)

The latest Oculus software adds spatial 3D audio to the mix, enabling users to pinpoint sounds above, below and around them in full 3D, amplifying the experience. The Crescent Bay also improves the head-tracking capability, supposedly eliminating the lag that plagued earlier models and invoked

company has been pushing forward in the entertainment world, having recently opened a virtual reality film studio with a slate of short interactive films planned, it remains to be seen if a consumer model will be anything more than an expensive gadget for wealthy tech-heads.

Magic Leap

Magic Leap promises much in the realm of education

feelings of nausea among some users. Oculus has hinted that it hopes to have a consumer model ready this year, but isn’t making any promises, and at the moment the use cases for the Rift are thin on the ground. So far, the company has concentrated on a VR display, with little integration of input technology beyond what a standard computer provides. Most of the consumer software designed using its SDK has followed suit, focusing on ‘virtual reality experiences’ with only limited support for games. Enterprise applications have largely been limited to virtual test drives and similar small-scale promotions, begging the question: who is the Rift aimed at? While the

Google Glass was certainly the most markettested of the AR headsets on the market, but with the Explorer program ended and Glass placed under the control of Nest CEO Tony Fadell while it undergoes its nebulous next stage of development, where does that leave Google in this market? The answer may not come from its Glass team, but from an independent startup it has been supporting. Last October, Google was among the lead investors in a $542m (£361m) round of funding for Magic Leap, a virtual and augmented reality company. Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Android, Chrome and apps at Google joined the firm’s board of directors and there were rumours that the investment came after a failed acquisition bid by Google. Recent patent applications by Magic Leap have hinted at the direction the company is taking, and it seems as though Google may be developing the company into the natural successor to Google Glass. Magic Leap is apparently working on a headset that would project directly onto the user’s retina, enabling it to fill entire rooms with digital images and

accommodating a wealth of applications, similar to the HoloLens. Control would be achieved through a number of physical objects used as totems by the headset. For example, a menu could be controlled with a charm necklace, with each charm associated with a particular app, or a six-sided die where each face triggered a different program. The patent applications even looked into marketing opportunities, with cereal mascots leaping from shelves to compete for your attention as you shopped.

Embracing AR While the technology behind all three of these systems is incredible, there will no doubt be a long teething period between the concepts we’ve seen and the arrival of polished, consumer-ready hardware. But perhaps the more important question to consider is whether or not the public will ever truly embrace augmented and virtual reality. AR and VR headsets are all about getting rid of the last bit of distance between the physical and digital worlds. Perhaps the lesson learned from the poor reception for Google Glass, and VR’s 50 years’ hoping for mainstream acceptance, is that we simply don’t want technology to become that integrated into our lives. MM

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

The Sales Machine Simartis CEO Razvan Ionescu explains how mobile network operators can massively improve the performance of their marketing campaigns using its Bubble platform ccording to Ericsson, the number of mobile subscriptions is set to exceed the global population this year. You might expect that MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) would be perfectly placed to benefit from this state of affairs. After all, they provide the vital foundations that facilitate almost every action people carry out on their smartphones, and they sit on a wealth of valuable data about their subscribers. Despite all this, though, many operators lag behind when it comes to communicating effectively and successfully with their own customers. “The MNOs have invested in understanding what customers are doing, what their buying power is, and even in predicting when they will be ready to buy,”

says Razvan Ionescu, CEO of Simartis, a Romanian telecom company working directly with operators to enable them to target their customers more effectively. “This data is a gold mine that the MNOs are keen to fully harvest.” Ionescu says that MNOs are already able to analyse and segment their customer base in order to make their products and services relevant to customers. “They already have the capacity to make offers that fit the customers needs,” he says. “The real challenge, however, is to deliver the offers at the right time when the customer has the phone in their hands and is ready to respond to them.” This is where Simartis’ mobile messaging platform, Bubble, comes in. “Bubble enables

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the MNO to provide the right offer, at the exact moment in time when the customer is most likely to say ‘YES’ with one click,” says Ionescu.

Real time, right time Bubble sidesteps the inbox and sends the MNO’s offers directly to the screens of their customers’ mobile devices, giving the operators total control over the channel. Even more importantly, it adds the ability to deliver offers in real time, with the knowledge that the recipient currently has the phone in their hands, and is ready to respond to the offer. How is this achieved? It’s down to the fact that Bubble messages can be targeted based on event triggers, such as when a

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call is completed or the handset connects to a network, complementing networkgenerated events that are related to the customer’s lifetime. Examples include when the customer drops below a certain pre-pay balance threshold, or approaches the end of their contract, both of which are events typically used by MNOs to target their customers. Usually the MNO reaches out through the more traditional (and less efficient) channel of SMS.

“Even if an MNO has a lot of data on its subscribers, it doesn’t necessarily have a clear view of the actual context of the customer,” says Ionescu. “The operator does not know if the customer has his device with him at the moment when the SMS is sent, or if he looks at the phone’s screen when the message arrives. With Bubble’s event triggers, you can see that the customer has just used their phone, and the offer you send can be linked to whatever action they’ve just taken.” These triggers can be combined with customer insights, in order to create truly contextually-relevant campaigns. For example, if a customer makes an international call, a special offer for an international minutes bundle can be displayed on the customer’s screen immediately after the call is ended. Alternatively, if a customer places their SIM card into a new handset – indicating that they have upgraded their device or perhaps that the previous device has been broken or lost – they can be targeted with an offer for phone insurance. “Bubble also complements real-time, network event-generating engines,” says

ANALYSIS

Ionescu. “Although some of these events can be tracked at the network level, Bubble offers can be truly realtime rather than ‘near-real-time’, as they are triggered by the individual SIM card.”

100 per cent improvement The most common method that MNOs currently use to reach their customers, Ionescu argues, simply isn’t up to the task. “MNOs use a variety of channels for their cross-sell, up-sell and retention campaigns. Mostly, due its low cost, they use SMS,” he says. “Unfortunately, the channel is also being used by a large number of third parties, many of whom do not pay as much attention to the relevance and timing of their offers. As a result, consumers have started to perceive SMS marketing messages as spam and ignore them. “The conversion rates for SMS campaigns used to sell services are in decline. The need for another low-cost sales channel, which is under the sole control of the MNOs, is undeniable.” Bubble gives MNOs the chance to start afresh with an entirely new channel that has no spam connotations. “The technology we use makes it impossible for somebody outside of the operator to send a Bubble message without the operator controlling it. Unlike SMS, it’s not possible to generate random numbers and just send out messages. Bubble is entirely in the hands of MNOs, and the channel will never get a reputation for being ‘spammy’, since the offer is displayed in a relevant context for the user.” Based on a number of previous campaigns, Simartis claims that MNOs moving from SMS to Bubble can expect an increase in conversion rates of at least 100 per cent. The results can be seen in a three-week POC, and it only takes few more weeks for full implementation. “Whether MNOs have invested in powerful analytical and Campaign

Management Systems or are still using the most basic tools, they still face the same bottleneck, which is the channel of delivery to customers,” says Ionescu. The Bubble offering, he says, can adapt to both of these cases. If operators require a CMS (Campaign Management System) they can use Bubble’s own, while for the more advanced operators, the solution works alongside their existing systems. “As an operator, you can invest a lot – rightfully so – in analytical capabilities and CMS,” Ionescu says. “By adding Bubble, you can complement those systems and give a lot more value to that investment. This is one of the main strengths of the Bubble platform.”

Razvan Ionescu, CEO, has 18 years experience in the Telco industry

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ANALYSIS

MARCH 2015

AN EXPERIENCED TEAM One key factor in the design of the Bubble solution is the fact that the company behind it, Simartis, was founded by experts who had worked in the marketing departments of a variety of major MNOs, including Orange, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom. So they have first-hand experience of the trials and tribulations faced by operators. “This experience is embedded in the DNA of the company. And that has only been enriched over time, as we have gained more staff,” says Ionescu. “The MNO experience within the company has enabled us to design Bubble with the issues that MNOs face in mind. All of our products are moulded in that spirit.”

Alex Voiculescu Partner, founder

Martin Kammer Advisor to the board

Ruediger Strack Advisor to the board

Moldcell Moldova

“Bubble enables Moldcell to increase the efficiency of its outbound up-sell, cross-sell and loyalty campaigns via the Bubble real-time, event-based interactive messaging platform, with more than 100 per cent improvement in response rates compared to traditional channels. Moldcell aims to position Bubble also over current third party SMS communications and advertorials to improve responsiveness and equally enhance the trust of its customers with this advertising tool.”

Daniel Lynch Member of the board

Olga Pavlic, strategic adjacencies and customer channels director, Moldcell, part of the Telia Sonera Group

One operator that has seen this first hand is the Moldovan MNO Moldcell, part of the Telia Sonera Group, which has enjoyed such success with Bubble that it is currently switching all of its third-party SMS communications over to the platform.

Third-party advertisers

Vlad Orghidan CTO; 15 years of Telco and IT&C experience

Raluca Cristurean Head of customer value management Consultancy Division; 16 years of Telco experience

Iulian Topliceanu Head of operations, maintenance and support; 14 years of Telco and IT&C experience

Iris Constantinescu Sales director; 20 years of IT&C experience

Cristian Chiru Customer value management expert; 11 years of Telco experience

Silvia Bogatu Account manager; 15 years of Telco experience

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Ram Ramamoorthy APAC business development & sales director; 28 years of IT&C experience

Andrew Pope Business development & area sales director; 10 years of Telco experience

It’s not just MNOs themselves who stand to benefit from Bubble. Third-party advertisers can also work with operators to reach their subscribers in the same way – the messages can be used to deliver everything from mobile coupons and tickets to polls and text-to-win competitions. “For third parties, the major advantage of Bubble is that the messages are immediately actionable,” says Ionescu. “You are asking the customer something and, unlike SMS, which is normally a one-way channel, they have to answer.” By presenting recipients with the choice to accept or reject the offer, each Bubble message is directly actionable, and remains visible on the device until the customer has responded, either positively or negatively. These third-party messages also represent another way of bolstering revenues for MNOs, while keeping the method of delivery under their control, so both the MNO and the advertiser stand to gain significantly, while the customer benefits from relevant, targeted offers. MM

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INTERVIEW

Location, Location, Location David Murphy talks to Theo Theodorou, EMEA GM for xAd, about how location technology is bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds Ad knows its place. And so it should: the company specialises in listening, vetting and filtering realtime mobile inventory to deliver the most accurate location data possible to ensure that ads reach audiences exactly where they are intended, whether at the country, region or city level or even as granular as the vicinity of a specific building. “As a global company, we have been able to work with some of the biggest brands in the world including Westfield, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart owned Asda among many others covering multiple sectors like auto, tech and fashion that have been leveraging location data,” says xAd EMEA GM, Theo Theodorou. “To date, our global scale has surpassed even our own expectations, with our platform reaching 300m unique devices, 300bn available ad impressions, over 30,000 mobile applications and close to 1m advertisers each month.”

store visitation through a combination of proximity and audience targeting, creating positive brand awareness and footfall.

Accuracy, precision and scale One of the key drivers behind these sorts of figures, says Theodorou, is the attention given to ensuring the accuracy of the location data. “It’s important to note that not all location data is created equal,” he says. “Our main USP is our technology and the fact that we vet and filter out up to 70 per cent of available inventory, so brands that require precise location are left with a set of data that is 100 per cent verified.” “We invest in our technology and are constantly evolving our product suite. One of the most exciting announcements we

will make in Europe this year is the launch of Footprints. Footprints is due to be a game changer in our industry as it is the first visualisation of real-time location data that allows users to view mobile visitation behaviours as they happen. Brands will now be able to see in real time what is happening, not only in their stores but also at their competitors. This is going to revolutionise the way that they are able to engage with customer and prospects. Visibility is a powerful tool. With Footprints, we’ve harnessed that power and put it in the hands of brand marketers for the first time.” MM For more on xAd and Footprints pass by their stand at MWC for live & private demos in hall 8.1 (App Planet), Booth #8.1I51

Seeing Is Believing…

Hot space Location is a hot space right now, as brands realise that a mobile user’s location history offers valuable insights into the types of things they might be interested in. “Mobile location technology is gaining momentum in Europe, and it’s only a question of time before it becomes a key part of the media mix,” says Theodorou. “The European market is very advanced and hungry for the latest and greatest in digital, which places us in an ideal environment that is receptive to our technology.” Recent xAd campaigns in Europe include work for Starbucks and Asda, where the company generated over 60 per cent lift in

xAd Footprints showing a realtime visualisation of store visits

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Making sense of the multi-device world Netbiscuits CEO Daniel Weisbeck says brands must tailor their content to the many devices consumers use and the various ways they engage n the beginning was the web, which you accessed, in almost every instance, on a PC. And then came mobile, which presented brands with a problem: how to display their web content on something with a much smaller screen and often much poorer connectivity. Some responded by doing nothing, leaving users to pinch and zoom their way around a full website on their mobile phone. Which, no matter how smart the smartphone, was never a good experience. Others built dedicated mobile versions of their websites, offering users a better experience, but one which often compared badly to the full website in terms of interactivity and engagement. And others went down the responsive or adaptive route, amending the content of the site on the fly, depending on the form factor of the device it was being viewed on.

identify trends. For example, if you know the top six devices and form factors that your customers use to access your online content, you can start optimising for those devices. Don’t just blindly optimise for the biggestselling devices, because they may not even figure in your usage stats.

Silver bullet But while responsive design looked like a silver bullet for a while, it’s clear now that this is only a solution if brands are asking themselves how best to use it. How do you present online content in the most appropriate, engaging manner, based on the form factor of the device as well as contextual factors such as location, connection quality, and the time of day? It’s clear that the content a mobile user wants when browsing on a poor connection in the morning, in a session lasting barely a minute, is different to what the same user will expect when browsing on a tablet in the evening sat at home on a fibre broadband wi-fi connection. And as the number of devices on which consumers can engage with you continues

From cross-device to each device

“THE KEY TO CRACKING THIS PROBLEM, OF COURSE, IS ANALYTICS” to proliferate, taking in wearables, cars, appliances and everything else covered by the Internet of Everything, the issue is becoming more pressing with each passing day.

Getting analytical The key to cracking this problem, of course, is analytics. There are a number of analytics solutions that can deliver reams of data on your users, but most fail on big data’s biggest challenge – visualisation and interpretation. To make sense of big data, brands need it presented in such a way that makes it easy to see what sort of connection users are on. Which devices have the biggest bounce rates? Who spent the longest time on the site and who spent the most money – two questions that often have different answers. With access to this kind of data, presented in a way that makes it easy to interpret, you can start to make sense of the numbers, and

There’s a lot of hype right now surrounding cross-device attribution – being able to track the same user accessing your content across different devices. No one has solved this problem yet, but the fact is that it’s less important than the real issue – serving the right content to that user depending on the device they’re on. No matter how good your ability to track them cross-device is, if the experience on each device is a bad one, you’ll lose them anyway. Get it right, however, and the potential upside is enormous. In research conducted by The People’s Web, 79 per cent of web users said they would be prepared to share personal information with brands if the context was right and the brand was delivering an optimal experience. And as we move into the era of the personal cloud, with individual consumers accumulating reams of data as they interact with phones, tablets, phablets, watches, fridges, cars, thermostats et al, the brands that win out will be those that can convince consumers to share this data with them. And the brands that can optimise content for each of the consumer’s devices are best placed to win this battle. There’s no time to lose. MM For more information on Netbiscuits’ analytics and device-detection solutions,visit www.netbiscuits.com/mobile-analytics

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INTERVIEW

Platform Play We talk to Jon Hook, VP, advertising evangelist at Phunware here’s a tendency in mobile for companies to opt for point solutions: to work with one company to build an app, another for advertising, another still for location-based services. It’s a strategy that’s rarely popular with the IT or procurement department, requiring the integration of multiple SDKs and logins, and one that also rarely delivers the most effective results for the company concerned. Phunware set out to address this issue when it started work on its Multiscreen as a Service (MaaS™) platform six years ago. The idea was to build an all-embracing horizontal stack composed of best-ofbreed individual components that perform brilliantly in isolation, but that add up to more than the sum of their parts when used in conjunction with each other. Having built the platform, Phunware has spent the last couple of years completing the jigsaw with the acquisition of several companies. These include Simplikate and Digby in the location space; TapIt, a supplyside platform for mobile advertising; and most recently, Odyssey Mobile Interaction, which specialises in delivering highimpact premium mobile advertising. The advertising acquisitions enable Phunware to offer brands, agencies and publishers a suite of vertical advertising solutions that leverages the capabilities and insights from SDKs like content management, push, analytics, and location marketing to target audiences across mobile.

Single customer view When asked why he gave up his role as head of mobile for a network agency to join a software startup, Phunware’s VP, advertising evangelist Jon Hook says it wasn’t a giant leap into the unknown. “I had been looking for a single platform that would give companies a real-time, single customer view on mobile. I looked around and the players redefining mobile were the software and

technology giants like Google and Facebook, not media companies,” he says. Hook sees the joining of two worlds as the secret to Phunware’s success. “Being a combination of an enterprise software company and an advertising business enables us to target, acquire and engage with an audience anytime, anywhere, and in the most appropriate manner.”

Engineering-led heritage Given Phunware’s robust, engineering-led heritage, it’s perhaps not surprising that it takes a thoughtful, consultative approach to its business activities. “We’re not out to sell apps, or ads, or location,” says Hook. “It’s more a case of working with a business to discover what issues or challenges it has, and then looking at how our technology can help to solve those problems.” WWE is a case in point. The entertainment behemoth wanted to discover whether it could “move fans around in an arena in a way that enhanced their experience”, said Joe Lalley, WWE’s vice president of digital products and operations. “The availability of new mobile technologies enabled us to do that, and it helped us manage the flow of crowds, which is important in terms of delivering a great fan experience,” he says. At WrestleMania 30, Phunware used a combination of iBeacons, notifications and its mobile content management system to provide fans a bevy of benefits: directions to their seats, alerts about autograph signings, instant replays of live action, and the ability to order food from their seats. The event saw some 170,000 user-initiated actions from 8,000 unique devices. While many businesses question the viability of iBeacons, WWE and Phunware deployed 44 iBeacon campaigns throughout WrestleMania 30 that delivered an average 30 per cent click-through rate.

Phunware’s platform is also widely deployed by retailers to drive footfall, and by hospitals and medical centres, saving hundreds of thousands of pounds by reducing the number of missed appointments via mobile patient solutions.

Platform integrity One of the reasons Phunware campaigns work so well, says Hook, is the integrity of the platform. “Our location tech is independently proven to be more accurate than Apple’s or Google’s, and far more accurate than location data being pulled via the advertising exchanges,” he says. “We can also do location and geo-fencing at scale, which means we can keep the geo-fences as tight as they need to be and still get the numbers the campaign needs, without targeting people who are too far from the store to respond.” This idea of integrity is a recurring theme in the Phunware story. “I’m not sure how you can advise a company on how they need to re-architect their infrastructure if they’ve never built this stuff. How do you know the use cases, feature sets and requirements of what the infrastructure has to do? That’s why the Fortune 5000 trusts us with their mobile and go-to-market strategy,” says Hook. MM

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COMMENT

The candidate is king Marketers with the right mobile and digital skills are in demand in 2015, says Digital Gurus’ Matt Hawkes

fter so many years of hype, 2014 was unquestionably the year in which mobile was accepted into the mainstream, following a perfect storm of utility, adoption, improved experience, measurability and some amazing success stories. All have helped build a trust and credibility that is catalysing a global transformation on many fronts. As a long-term champion of the space, I have seen many innovators utilise the unique capabilities of mobile, but only recently have the results been so successful and game-changing. Indeed, I think the lessons have now been learned, and

a 95 per cent increase in video posts in the last 12 months. This widespread uptake provides a real opportunity for marketers. We’re seeing agencies building teams around mobile and paid social, whilst video experience is becoming more and more prevalent in job specifications.

will herald a mobile ‘age of enlightenment’, where acceptance paves the way for refinement, more evolution and even more breakthroughs.

Emerging technology Mobile and digital is a key pillar of what’s hot in emerging technology. At ground level it is evolving rapidly, so much so it is completely changing behaviours and the way we interact. My mobile device, for example, has become a conduit for the many new and popular ways we can now communicate, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Twitter,

“THE LESSONS HAVE BEEN LEARNED, AND TODAY MOBILE IS BEING USED MUCH MORE STRATEGICALLY BY BRANDS” today mobile is being used much more strategically by brands. At Digital Gurus, we have 75 consultants internationally, working across sales, marketing technology and creative. Mobile now impacts on all of our teams. As a group, we love what we’re seeing and we predict another huge year for the industry. At the top of the foodchain, Apple has just reported its most profitable period ever, while the mobile-first taxi app Uber is exploding internationally (despite its PR nightmares). There are countless other startups with great ideas and ambitions be the next big thing. Perhaps the next 12 months

Internet of things devices such as Nest are set for a big year

and many other games and apps, not to mention email, SMS (and of course telephone calls). Our clients think that mobile advertising will build on the trends seen in 2014. Last year, programmatic and video went off the chart. This year will see even bigger gains by the players that can better engage targeted audiences at scale. The most exciting companies are those that are able to use contextual relevance and data to leverage localised information, personalise an engagement or even make it interactive. Another interesting trend is the rapid rise of social video. Facebook recently reported

The internet of things is another area in which we expect more growth. Society is moving towards a connected everything, all potentially controlled by our smart devices via sensors. The big brands in each market are vying for control and investing heavily. We’re seeing more brands embrace digital and mobile skills and this was the fastestgrowing sector for our business last year. With so many exciting things happening across a multitude of cool and cutting-edge niches, there is fierce competition for those with the best skills. There has been much written about a so-called war for talent. This may be true, but ultimately this benefits the job-seeker as higher salaries, perks and fringe benefits make up the battleground. Above all, we say the candidate is king in 2015. Power to you! MM

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COMMENT

MARCH 2015

BUCKLEY ON… …LOCATION

More than a decade after its launch, Russell Buckley considers the lessons learned from pioneering location-based marketing service ZagMe years ago, I helped get a UK startup off the ground that had ambitions to conquer location-based marketing. In hindsight, we were ludicrously ahead of our time. The world is only now catching up with our vision of the future. That said, we had a lot of success at the time, recruiting 85,000 consumers to the service and running 1,500 campaigns for the likes of Burger King, Reebok and TopShop. Now that location seems to be a hot topic again, here’s a recap of what we learned.

Lesson 1: Location isn’t always a good proxy for context There’s often an assumption that if you know where someone is, you automatically understand context. For example, if someone is on Oxford Street and they’ve opted-in to receive marketing messages from a shop (or shops) in that location, we assume they’ll be delighted to get them. But that’s not necessarily the case. While the strict definition of spam is around opt-in, it’s as much about how the recipient feels when they get the message. If they feel irritated for whatever reason, the marketer has lost, even if the consumer has opted in originally. That annoyance might translate into a permanent opt-out.

Lesson 2: Scale is hard Rightly or wrongly, marketing continues to be about reach first, targeting second. We start with a big number, and then apply filtering such as demographic or location data to arrive at a smaller audience – which still needs to be substantial to drive results.

However, location filtering is pretty brutal in reducing the size of the audience. As an example, there may be millions of people in London interested in shopping at TopShop. But if you apply filtering to consumers in the vicinity of one outlet, who have also opted into the service, the target audience gets drastically reduced. If you then apply a time-of-day criterion (today at 1pm, for example), the potential millions you started with often ends up being one or two people. This audience won’t justify the time and money invested in the campaign.

Lesson 3: Staff training is vital Location is often used as a variant of performance marketing, as opposed to simple branding. This needs the involvement of shop staff. If the consumer shows a coupon on their phone to redeem a reward, the staff must be able to process it. However, this proved very challenging in our experience. We’d often visit a shop before a campaign was broadcast to brief the staff face-to-face (clearly not a scalable option). Five minutes later, consumers would start arriving, waving their mobiles around, only to be faced with blank stares by the very staff we had just briefed. While the technology may have improved in the last 15 years, training has remained a real issue – we can’t just assume that staff will know what to do.

Lesson 4: Don’t pay consumers to receive advertising ZagMe had a loyalty aspect to the service, where consumers would receive money for

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every advertising message they received. While this clearly made sense to me at the time, I’ve become adamant that this is fundamentally the wrong approach. Many others have subsequently tried a variant of rewarding consumers, but none (to my knowledge) has ever really succeeded at any scale, and I remain skeptical of the model. My argument is that if you have to pay someone to be exposed to advertising, there is an implicit suggestion that the message itself doesn’t have a value. This is the wrong way of thinking – consumers should want to receive the message as it helps them in some way. Indeed, a core test of whether a marketer should send a message in the first place is ‘Will the recipient love this, or at the very least, find it useful?’ If the answer is ‘no’, then it shouldn’t be sent. There are other arguments I could use, such as the fact that the amount they can affordably be paid is generally derisory. And that consumers interested in earning a few pounds per month are probably not going to be an attractive audience anyway.

Lesson 5: Exclusivity is key The one way that we could guarantee disappointing people was sending them an offer that was available anyway in-store. There was a sense of: ‘Why did you bother me with something that I would have seen anyway?’, and the shoppers had a point. MM Those were the key lessons I’ve learned, but if you’d like the whole story, you can download my whitepaper at www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com

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