One of the stories that I recently shared at SXSW includes my reaction to the first tap on my wrist from the Apple Watch. It was no laughing matter then, but it brings chuckles now.
Please check it out and laugh along.
One of the stories that I recently shared at SXSW includes my reaction to the first tap on my wrist from the Apple Watch. It was no laughing matter then, but it brings chuckles now.
Please check it out and laugh along.
Robots and virtual reality advances aside, my SXSW experience was heavy on results and opportunities around mobile video.
On the live streaming side, we now know that last year’s SXSW darling Meerkat was forced to change its business model with the appearance of Facebook Live and the adoption of Periscope.
It was Facebook’s moves and associated metrics that especially caught my attention over the last few days:
As shared by a company executive, 100 million hours of video are viewed every day on Facebook. Mobile is a large driver.
Ninety percent of the views on Facebook for the Straight Outta Compton trailer were on mobile.
The trailer for Furious 7 had 100 million views on Facebook, with an undisclosed but high number on mobile devices.
Approximately 2.2 million people watched the Facebook Live stream of Peyton Manning’s retirement announcement. This came despite the fact that the event was shown on a variety of television and online outlets.
Facebook has long viewed mobile as its biggest growth opportunity. Clearly video is key to the company’s aspirations.
Elsewhere:
Of the gazillion people at SXSW, no one brought a better in-flight Wi-Fi solution. Damn.
In a panel on beacons, Clorox's Sarah Ortman said that a brand’s mobile outreach in store should solve a problem or delight a consumer. Or both.
Despite the hype, I didn’t see many robots at SXSW unless you count those who stayed out until 4 a.m. and were forced to attend early morning panels.
The majority of McDonald’s U.S. business is via the drive thru, making mobile solutions more important. The company had a large presence in Austin.
In the UK this year, mobile ad spending will surpass TV spending as well as desktop spending, according to eMarketer
Half of all debit card holders don't believe it's safe to use their card for online purchases, Kantar reported. I wonder what these people would say about using a smartphone to make a purchase. Likely, no, thanks.
In 2015, Apple sold 441 iPhones per minute.
Be it the Internet of Things, the smart home, virtual reality or something else, change is coming.
The next big stage is this week’s SXSW Interactive, where check-in pioneer Foursquare (which has since morphed) and Oculus Rift, a virtual reality gaming headset, were introduced.
It’s also where Meerkat won the day in 2015 only to be forced to change its business model less than a year later when it was overtaken by Twitter/Periscope and Facebook Live.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said that innovation separates leaders from followers. Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis says, “You have to have a big vision and take very small steps to get there.”
The pace is in dispute, but the need to advance technologies and find new ways to engage with the near always-on user is universal.
But how? And what shape does that take?
“If you (as a marketer) have a real specific need for doing it and you think it's going to solve a problem, being an early adopter (of technology) is great,” longtime marketer Jonathan Stephen told me in an interview for my The Art of Mobile Persuasion book (www.artofmobilepersuasion.com). “You are quick to fail and quick to being successful. There are others out there who think this can be an enhancement to an experience and maybe those are the ones who don't necessarily jump on the early bandwagon but they continue to see as the technology improves itself, that they will adapt over time and a lot of the kinks will have been worked out. Best practice would have been created and they would have followed those guidelines.
“It really depends on the position that you're in. If you've got the capital to do that kind of investment, by all means I always think that being an early adopter is fantastic but you have to be prepared to fail. You're not going to get it right the first time (all the time). No one ever has.”
Sometimes being second, third or later has its advantages.
WhatsApp, built by former Yahoo employees as a text-messaging alternative, is a cross-platform mobile messaging app that allows users to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS. In 2014, Facebook purchased the company and access to more than 600 million active users for $19 billion.
“I always use the phrase, ‘I may not be early to the party but I always like to make an entrance,’” Stephen said. “Sometimes there are technologies out there and I wasn't the first to get to it but I definitely want to make sure that I get noticed when I launched that technology. It takes a lot of thought. It takes a lot of strategy in terms of what is behind it. It takes a lot of humility to take a step back and realize where you will be successful and where you want there to go.
“There will be a lot of successes and a lot of failures. You learn that over time. But more than anything it goes all the way back to that business strategy.”
Others who I talked to for the book view things in similar ways.
Curtis Kopf has seen – and been part of innovation – in large enterprises including Microsoft, Amazon and Alaska Airlines.
At Amazon, he was part of a hand-picked 14-person team in the U.S., Europe and Asia that scaled and extended “Search Inside the Book,” a discovery tool that searches and displays the full contents of hundreds of thousands of books from domestic and international publishers.
“Every company wrestles with this,” Kopf told me when speaking of innovation. “We all come from different places whether you are an airline, a bank, or Amazon.com. I've experienced the spectrum of companies based on their business model and who they are have different comfort levels and appetites.
“Amazon.com is going to be a company that makes really big bets -- things that may not materialize for five years or seven years, even ten years. Other companies won't view the world that way.”
Everyone, Kopf said, has a place.
“There's definitely a continuum of innovation and then there are obviously companies out there that are category creators,” he said. “Clearly a lot of the companies that we think of innovators weren't first. Obviously Google wasn't the first search engine (in fact, 20 were launched earlier, according to Wikipedia). They just did it in a new and better way. Apple definitely wasn't the first to do a smartphone. They just did it in a new and better way.
“Innovation is talked about so much that it is almost become meaningless. Every company on the planet says that they are innovative. It's part of their mission statement. Obviously as consumers we all interact with these brands and the truth is that they are not all innovative.”
“Being first is great. There are times that being first could be really important. If you can get it an advantage that you can sustain, there's some buzz and credit that you get from customers by introducing something first. But I don't think innovation in and of itself means being first. It could be taking something that someone else started and doing it in a new way.”
What should we expect to see in Austin this week and what should be our SXSW takeaways?
“South By (Southwest) has an interesting mix of what are perceived to be cutting edge talks or technologies that are really pretty basic,” Sean Bartlett, a former senior Lowe’s executive who is now Worldwide Industry Lead for Retail at Apple, told me.
“There is also the technology itself which is interesting. And then, what I think is most important, with respect to what I've taken away from South By in the few times that I've been there, is more cultural and how you think about things.
“One of the things that I took from a panel a couple of years ago that has actually become a guiding principle of the team is this notion of commitment to craftsmanship. I saw a panel of well-known startup CEOs talking about their products. One of the things that really hit home was how they talked about craftsmanship and quality of the product and the overall experience. It’s a true cultural takeaway that you can bring back and put in effect immediately. You come back from the show and on a Monday you can really start to drive that message home. That's one that always sticks out when I think about that particular show.”
It isn’t called the major leagues for nothing. Major League Baseball had 8.4 billion minutes streamed to its mobile app in 2015, per comScore. A total of 53% of the total minutes consumed were in the At Bat app with users watching or listening to games. The activity was more than than in all other U.S. official sports leagues apps combined.
Nearly one in four shoppers say that they have changed their minds while in a checkout line after looking up details on a smartphone: Google.
Meerkat is dropping the livestream. It’s a cautionary tale for those looking at "solutions"at SXSW that may be shiny and not stand test of time,
Headline: Retail Executives Say Mobile Investments to Increase This Year. Me: you don't say.
Two weeks after calling for an Apple boycott call, Donald Trump was using an iPhone to send half of his tweets: Marketing Land.
A man with a gun while taking selfies fatally shot himself in Concrete, Washington, police say. Interestingly, the Russian government has issued a guide to discourage people from taking dangerous selfies.
Consumers’ use of health apps and wearables has doubled in the past two years, according to Accenture.
After all this time, Apple has now opened a Twitter account to answer tech questions and to deal with problems.
I read a story that predicted: "When you tuck your iPhone 9 into your back pocket, it may well flex to conform to the contours of your butt" I can only say yay.
One in 10 U.S. Internet users (31.1 million people) will be mobile-only this year, eMarketer reported.
Mobile payments make up only 3% Of U.S. transactions, per GfK. Weren’t we told that cash would be gone by some Tuesday in 2015?
Hard words rather than hardware are what marketers should chiefly remember from the recently concluded Mobile World Congress.
Sandwiched in Barcelona between the new phones, wearables, and virtual reality gear was straight talk from Martin Sorrell, chief executive of advertising group WPP.
Speaking of what he called a “mobile revolution”, Sorrell admonished marketers for yesterday’s thinking.
"We haven't adapted," Sorrell said from figuratively and literally a global stage. "When people talk about creativity in our industry, they're talking about Don Draper. They're not talking about the new definitions. Believe it or not, people inside media agencies are creative. Software engineers are creative ... It's the definition of it -- we haven't contextualized it correctly yet.”
Sorrell’s comments mirror those that I shared from Hank Wasiak in my The Art of Mobile Persuasion book (http://artofmobilepersuasion.com).
Wasiak, the former vice chairman of McCann Erickson and now partner in The Concept Farm, told me:
“I challenge you to walk into an agency, say that you are going to do a campaign and say ‘give me your ideas in about 3 hours’. Not one is going to optimize around the mobile experience. I'll give you $1,000 if you find one. (Instead) they still say ‘here's a great commercial.’
“They look at mobile as more of a delivery device for their creative work. It is supposed to be something where they can creatively integrate their ideas. Mobile is just a big turnaround for them and then they don't get it yet.”
In Barcelona, Sorrell credited smaller entities with some success in getting closer to the customer via the wireless device.
"The essential problem is that big companies are not thinking about mobile in the right way," Sorrell said. “They're thinking of it as an extension of digital, just a way to reach consumers. They're not thinking of it in a way that changes their businesses or adds values in a way they weren't able to do previously."
“Probably the mobile revolution has not registered yet with companies, although it might have registered more ironically with the long tail then it has with larger companies. But it still has not penetrated companies to the degree it should have.”
Earlier, Wasiak told me that the era demands “a totally new and dynamic marketing landscape”.
“There's a difference between engaging with a human being and having a human experience,” Wasiak said in The Art of Mobile Persuasion. “Any company, brand or retailer should make believe that they are having a FaceTime call with them. It's the next best thing to being there. You're on FaceTime. I called, you've accepted. You see me, you know what I want. You know the situation that I'm in. I can tell by the tone of your voice and the look on your face how you feel. If you can try to draw those pictures in your mind through data, it’s better to get that attitude that I'm having a FaceTime call. This just isn't a digital connection.
“Smartphone-enabled consumers have kicked open the doors to a totally new and dynamic marketing landscape. This is first time in my 50-year marketing lifetime that we have the opportunity to be in service to the consumer virtually any time or any place in their daily lives. An awesome opportunity that comes with a huge responsibility.”
And, to date, with harsh assessments from industry pioneers.
(first published on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2016/02/27/three-damning-words-for-marketers-proceeding-with-yesterday’s-thinking/)
Lost in the glitzy introduction of new smartphones at Mobile World Congress is the fact that 35 percent of U.S. mobile users still carry a feature phone. And, according to new research, that percentage won’t change in a meaningful way anytime soon.
Kantar reported that more than half of current feature phone users say that they won't upgrade to smartphone in the next year or are unsure if they will do so.
Feature phone owners tend to be older, are more likely to be retired, and often have a limited income. Unreachable for mobile marketers? Hardly. Mobile loyalty club that use text messaging enable all to participate. And young and old are looking for deals and value. Those programs often lead to sales and a boost in loyalty.
In a sobering study by Duke’s The Fuqua School of Business and others, 40% of CMO’s surveyed say that mobile has made zero contribution to their businesses. Yet the same group says that the spend on the channel will increase 147% in three years.
Nissan disabled its smartphone app after hackers use it to control a Leaf electric car, per Yahoo news.
It amazes me how many marketers even now have no clue that you can't buy a list and just send texts to mobile users.
As the talk and hype build for 5G, it was reported at Mobile World Congress that 4G is in more than 150 countries and will cover two thirds of the population by 2020.
Headline in the Huffington Post: Beacon Use in Retail Stores Will Be Just as Common as Cash Registers. Me: more hype, plus it’s important to note that the number of registers is on the decline with other point of sale systems being adopted.
Only 0.3% of mobile owners use ad blockers, according to M&C Saatchi's CEO James Hilton.
Fifty percent of brands surveyed by the Rubicon Project predict that they will be spending 81-100% of their budget this year in programmatic private marketplaces.
It’s two months into the year and the mobile loyalty clubs that I belong to haven't moved any closer to personalized communications. #dejavu.
Instagram has over 200,000 advertisers in its first five months of operation.
Speaking of ROI, 44% in an eMarketer poll say that the lack of definitive return on investment is holding back wearables.
In 2020, you will be able to fill out your census form on your smartphone, Pew said.
Coca-Cola created packaging that converts into a Google Cardboard-style virtual reality viewer for the iPhone.
Lost in the glitzy introduction of new smartphones at Mobile World Congress is the fact that 35 percent of U.S. mobile users still carry a feature phone. And, according to new research, that percentage won’t change in a meaningful way anytime soon.
Kantar reported that more than half of current feature hone users say that they won't upgrade to smartphone in the next year or are unsure if they will do so.
Feature phone owners tend to be older, are more likely to be retired, and often have a limited income. Unreachable for mobile marketers? Hardly. Mobile loyalty club that use text messaging enable all to participate. And young and old are looking for deals and value. Those programs often lead to sales and a boost in loyalty.
In a sobering study by Duke’s The Fuqua School of Business and others, 40% of CMO’s surveyed say that mobile has made zero contribution to their businesses. Yet the same group says that the spend on the channel will increase 147% in three years.
Nissan disabled its smartphone app after hackers use it to control a Leaf electric car, per Yahoo news.
It amazes me how many marketers even now have no clue that you can't buy a list and just send texts to mobile users.
As the talk and hype build for 5G, it was reported at Mobile World Congress that 4G is in more than 150 countries and will cover two thirds of the population by 2020.
Headline in the Huffington Post: Beacon Use in Retail Stores Will Be Just as Common as Cash Registers. Me: more hype, plus it’s important to note that the number of registers is on the decline with other point of sale systems being adopted.
Only 0.3% of mobile owners use ad blockers, according to M&C Saatchi's CEO James Hilton.
Fifty percent of brands surveyed by the Rubicon Project predict that they will be spending 81-100% of their budget this year in programmatic private marketplaces.
It’s two months into the year and the mobile loyalty clubs that I belong to haven't moved any closer to personalized communications. #dejavu.
Instagram has over 200,000 advertisers in its first five months of operation.
Speaking of ROI, 44% in an eMarketer poll say that the lack of definitive return on investment is holding back wearables.
In 2020, you will be able to fill out your census form on your smartphone, Pew said.
Coca-Cola created packaging that converts into a Google Cardboard-style virtual reality viewer for the iPhone.
Despite its negative reputation in some circles, I will argue that the selfie has done more to drive smartphone adoption and bring people closer than any other recent product enhancement. I came across another reason to smile:
Until March 14, Disney Parks will donate $5 to Make-A-Wish – up to $1 million – for every “ear photo” shared on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #ShareYourEars. What kind of ears? “Cool ears. Funny ears. Mickey Mouse ears. We want to see them all!”
So show ‘em.
Customizing vehicles and watching a video on a manufacturer’s website are the most common activities on desktops for vehicle-shopping individuals, per Ipsos. On mobile, Nos. 1 and 2 are reaching out to family and friends and reaching out to a dealership or salesperson.
Ninety percent of smartphone users have used their devices to find a location, per Pew. The activity upended the free-standing and pricey navigation units that we no longer use or want.
Gizmodo reported the availability of the first smartphone with built-in FLIR thermal vision that can also survive a hurricane. The line of people is short for such a “need”.
Yahoo's Simon Khalaf says that we're at the end of Mobile 1.0 and we're entering Mobile 2.0. Let’s commit to punching anyone who calls 2016 The Year of Mobile 2.0.
More from Khalaf: time in the mobile browser decreased from 20% to 9% since 2013.
Emergency room visits by distracted walkers are up 124% in five years, reported The Wall Street Journal.
LinkedIn should block users from sending generic invites to connect. Someone needs to save these dolts from being stupid and lazy.
An Adweek infographic showed that 32% use tech or an app to track exercise. But left unanswered is whether others don’t exercise or just not track.
After all these years and successes, do we still need stories about the importance of building a mobile loyalty club though SMS opt-in? It isn't that I question the notion that these clubs are valuable. But are we still at such elementary how-to stage?
Eighty-two percent of TV ad-driven searches during Super Bowl were done on smartphones, vs. 70% in 2015: Google. But only 7% on tablets as smartphones continue to eat into the use of those devices.
We used to go to banks. Now, more and more, those institutions are coming to us. Or more specifically to our mobile devices.
imaginBank is the first mobile-only bank in Spain and the first in the world which is operated exclusively on cell phone and social network apps, according to the GSMA, which represents mobile operators worldwide. It also has an ATM search application for smartwatches and a service to check bank accounts, transactions and bills without having to leave Facebook.
69% of shoppers who use high-tech research products on a mobile device during a store visit vs. 54% of non-high-tech shoppers, comScore reported. Also, 76% of high-tech shoppers tracked delivery on a mobile device vs. 65% of non-high-tech shoppers.
Mobile spend is now 37% of all SEM spend (up 23% YoY), per Adobe.
In 2015, only 32% of email was opened on PCs, while 68% was opened on mobile devices, Movable Ink reported.
U.S. Hispanic and African-American voters are more likely than whites to get political news via mobile: Pew
A sanctioned Ted Cruz app enables the politician to capture individuals' location, contact list, email addresses, AP reported.
Mobile was 86% of Twitter's $641 million in Q4 ad revenue (up 48% YoY).
Mobile games reached $34.8 billion in 2015, captured 85% of all app revenues, according to App Annie.
2016 will be the first year where more than half of the US population uses Facebook, eMarketer predicted.
In an international ranking of LTE download speeds, the U.S. came in 55th place, OpenSignal said.
By 2020, more people will own a mobile phone than have electricity, Cisco said in a forecast.
While lack of lots of mobile in Super Bowl ads was a missed opportunity, it didn’t take the cake on a week when a $63 million lottery ticket went unclaimed.
I came across what was billed as a mobile strategy blog with the last post 856 days ago? Nothing has changed since then, huh?
The milestone that was the 50th Super Bowl will be remembered, too, for the advancements that advertisers made by including meaningful calls to action for mobile device owners.
But much like the spotty play on the field, there were clear missed opportunities and disappointments that not more was done to make the day all that it could be.
If we were to do a SportsCenter-like show highlighting the mobile wins, these would be included:
NO MORE, an advocacy group that works to combat domestic violence and sexual assault, maximized the moment by building a mobile database with a powerful commercial that follows a text message conversation between two friends. A woman’s reluctance to come to a Super Bowl party at a friend’s house, after missing a few social occasions, coupled with her silence when questioned about her well-being, raises concern for her safety. Texting was used to point out one of the many signs of domestic violence, namely her inability to talk about an abusive relationship.
The spot ends by calling on viewers to “TEXT ‘NO MORE’ TO 94543.”
For a limited time beyond Super Bowl 50, people who opted into the text program will receive action-oriented messages educating them on common signs of abuse and steps they can take to help victims of domestic violence and/or sexual assault. The texts will also reinforce the message that “you don’t need be an expert to get involved, you just need to be a friend.”
Why was this message so, pardon the pun, spot on?
NO MORE has found that 64% of Americans say that simply starting a conversation about domestic violence and sexual assault would make it easier to help someone.
Also, as we know, Gallup and others report that texting is a dominant way of communicating for Americans under 50.
Interestingly, the cost of the airtime and production was covered by the National Football League.
Elsewhere during the telecast, just before the game began, Esurance launched a contest where every retweet of a specified hashtag was entered into a sweepstakes. It was a good start in asking viewers to do something with their mobile phones. Later, it was reported that the ad generated 9,000 tweets a minute.
Separately, Quicken Loans encouraged viewers to get a mortgage via a mobile app. There was immediate backlash from The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and others urging people to take their time with such an important process, but the availability of such an option is surely welcome to some who will want the convenience after doing their research on their phone or computer.
Finally, developer Machine Zone pushed mobile app downloads of Mobile Strike with Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in the spot.
The “misses” list was just as noteworthy:
Apartments.com had a Jefferson’s parody to encourage watchers to “move on up”, but its tagline Change your apartment. Change the world dropped the ball on the biggest change in the category, namely the fact that large numbers of apartment hunters use their mobile phones to research, view and sign leases to new places to live.
Also, viewers were entertained by wiener dogs racing to condiment bottles, but it was learned on Twitter that MeetTheKetchups had a longer director's cut. Why didn’t Heinz use television to drive traffic to a mobile web site or produce and promote a mobile app to take advantage of the buzz?
Elsewhere, we were asked to "go online to view the new Jungle Book (Disney movie) trailer". But there was no app or call to action for viewers to see more footage via opt-in. The call to action used was disappointing because it was vintage 1997.
Overall, I’d say that advertisers moved the ball in 2016. But to fully score next year and beyond, marketers must more fully acknowledge and cater to the mobile generation of viewers.
(article first appeared on Mobile Marketer - http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/22225.html)
In the X’s and O’s game of Super Bowl advertising, marketers have consistently taken a pass on mobile.
Sure, we’ve seen spots with Shazam calls to action and others that have asked viewers to download a mobile app, but I can’t point to one meaningful attempt to engage tens of millions or more after the Big Game is done.
The missed opportunities have been many, including this one that goes back seven years:
Some, probably many, may have had too good a time to remember, but a great deal of us among the 95 million who watched the Super Bowl in February 2009 remember the television spots run by restaurant chain Denny’s to promote free Grand Slam breakfasts. The campaign’s elements were easy to follow—all viewers needed to do was to go to a Denny’s the following Tuesday for free eggs along with toast with hash browns or grits.
Denny’s reported that approximately 2 million took advantage of the offer. Although many might view that as a success, Denny’s was left with egg on its face when quick service restaurant Arby’s did it one better two months later by building in a way to remarket to patrons through a high-profile, national television campaign.
Here’s how it worked:
To start out, for the launch of its Roastburger product, Arby’s had comedian/entertainer Jimmy Kimmel create, eat, and promote the new sandwich on Jimmy Kimmel Live, a late-night nationally broadcast TV program airing on ABC.
Viewers were urged to text the word Roastburger to short code 27297 to receive a free sandwich with the purchase of any drink. After texting, customers were asked to respond with their zip code to be entered into a local database and to receive additional offers from Arby’s. By doing this, the restaurant gained a valuable remarketable database.
As a result of the one segment:
- Arby’s received 177,745 total entries from 152,280 unique participants
- Approximately 65,000 people opted in to join the mobile loyalty club
- The restaurant created 172 local databases to cater to the opted-in customers on a hyperlocal level
Two years ago, I asked Sean Bartlett, then director of mobile strategy and platforms at Lowe's, for some perspective on the lack of mobile calls to action on Super Bowl telecasts.
“I'm going with preserving creative integrity,” Bartlett, now Worldwide Industry Lead for Retail at Apple, told me.
But can we not have “creative integrity” that includes a mobile call to action?
“Yes, though most are brand anthems, not direct response,” he said.
Last year, on a scale of 1-100, the risk that the Seattle Seahawks took at the end of Super Bowl XLIX by throwing instead of giving the ball to Marshawn Lynch at the 1 sat at 379. And we know how that turned out (the New England Patriots intercepted a pass and won the championship).
On the same scale, on the risk that the telecast advertisers chose when it comes to mobilizing their marketing messages, the number rested squarely at 0.
My belief is that with the right trigger, a Super Bowl spot lives on well beyond the stench of putrid play-calling and uneaten nachos.
It is not hard to imagine some of that from many of the commercials.
What if last year in the last seconds of an ad that was instantly beloved, Budweiser urged touched viewers to save a dog and provided a keyword and short code to be contacted after the game? Do you not think the emotional string pulled would have resulted in pet adoptions?
To me, it gets back to the question of risk.
Just what would advertisers lose if they took the last three seconds of a commercial to add a call to action for viewers to use their phones? What is the worst that could happen? No one would respond.
Will the Super Bowl 50 telecast mark a mobile milestone? On a day when more money will be wagered than any other in 2016, I’m not betting on it.
-
(article first appeared on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2016/01/31/will-super-bowl-advertisers-take-another-pass-on-mobile/)
One of big opportunities for Gap is personalization "but it may not be this year. It's the holy grail" -- Caroline Sheu, the company’s VP of Global Digital Marketing, said at the excellent Mobile Ventures Summit event in San Francisco.
More from Sheu - it's apps and mobile web, not one or the other. Be everywhere the customer lives, she said.
And one last one – the best foot forward for Gap is building an app for its best customers, not one that is for all. It’s about focus and working the funnel. Others like REI have said the same thing.
One in 3 smartphone owners have streamed video via a subscription service on their phone: Pew.
Mobile accounted for 52% percent of Google clicks (including ads and organic) in the fourth quarter of 2015, per Merkle/RKG.
40% of PepsiCo's Super Bowl budget is going to digital, including Snapchat, Adweek reported.
100 million hours of video are watched daily on Facebook, the company said.
Pinterest's mobile users exceeded desktop within a day of launching the mobile app, according to the company’s Kevin Knight.
RBC's Mark Mahaney said mobile became material when it reached 20% of revenue or traffic.
Visa will brings NFC (near field communications) to all the payment terminals at Levi’s Stadium for Super Bowl 50.
As much as the media makes it out to be a sprint, mobile payments is a marathon that will take decades -- Visa's Chris Curtin, Chief Brand & Innovation Marketing Officer.
Facebook earned $5,630,000,000 in Q4 in revenue from advertising, and about 80% of that came from mobile. Mobile ad revenue was up 82% year over year.
Leaders who measure impact of their online and offline spend will allocate up to 20% of their budget to mobile – Forrester.
Broadcast advertising spending jumped 13% to end 2015, while overall TV spending was up 9%: Standard Media Index. Take note, mobile and social hypesters.
An Ohio fugitive who sent police a selfie because he didn't like his mugshot was tracked down and arrested. Note modern devices are called smartphones. No one says that they are used only by smart people.
56% of smartphone users purchased a product using an app in 2015: Verizon.
I’m getting more spam voice calls on mobile - way more than spam texts. WTF?
In the poorest countries, mobile phones cost 1/5 to 1/2 of monthly income. In U.S., it's under 1%, per The World Bank.
Google paid Apple $1 billion to be the search engine on your iPhone, according to court documents.
Uber usage by business travelers surpassed taxi and car rentals in 2015, VentureBeat reported.
20% of U.S. homes now have a smart TV, 56% have a tablet and 82% of people have a smartphone, Nielsen said.
Amazon now sells as much clothing as 250 Walmart stores sell altogether: Re/Code.
Uber is preparing to go live with full-scale food delivery service in 10 U.S. cities this quarter, according to The Wall Street Journal.
3.8 trillion photos were taken until mid-2011. 1 trillion photos were taken in 2015 alone, MIT SMR reported.
Headline: Less Than Half of Consumers Are OK With Swapping Data for Deals. Me: 47% who say good to go is huge.
Ken Chenault of American Express: mobile pay is not about the "tap", it's about what's the value? what's the service I get? Bingo.
U.S. smartphone users spent 3 hours in mobile apps and another 50 minutes in mobile browsers daily in 2015: eMarketer
I have made a living NOT hyping mobile yet it fascinates me when brands and others operate in waiting, non-priority mode.
Per NBC's Alan Wurtzel, just 51% of TV viewing is live.
Twitter asked me to promote my app. I don't have one. 2016 personalization seems like 2015's – or 2008’s.
The idea of targeting and retargeting is not new. What’s changing is the potential for cross-device targeting. We now have the capability to take the search done for an Armani necktie on a PC and use it as a trigger to send a mobile user a related communication at a later point.
But should we?
Few are as equipped to answer that question as Google’s Jason Spero, who literally has written The Mobile Playbook that is relied on by so many marketers.
“If you admire someone's shoes or their tie, in the mobile and the digital world when you didn't have connectivity at that moment, you would file it away in your head or make a note to yourself,'” Spero said in an interview for my book, The Art of Mobile Persuasion.
“As human beings, we've always had impulses, fears, hopes. What happens when you see that tie, you have connectivity. You can act on it in a way that you couldn't in previous eras. The idea of persistent connectivity makes it possible for you to act on all those impulses. You may not act on all of them. It's probably a bad thing if you act on them all because you are probably buying stuff that you don't need and tweeting out stuff that people don't want to read. But the idea of connectivity means that you can.”
“The consumer knows that he or she is connected and empowered in all these ways,” Spero explained. “The consumer's expectation is they want an easy way to buy an Armani tie if they decide to. And that's a combination of the Macy's app and Google search and maybe image search in time. Lots of different things will fuel that. But all are powered by the idea that you have a broadband connection with you constantly.
“The consumer also knows that their device has a sense of geospacial relations. You as a consumer know that with your device at any point, with a couple of exceptions, it can tell you what's around you to help you solve problems. You can go out and get the world's information with your connection or you can map the physical world around you. You know the nearest place to get a hamburger. Or which subway will get you to the Upper East Side. Or what the check-in time is at your hotel. All these things are now available to you: the digital world and the physical world at your service.”
And with that, Spero said, comes a need for marketers to look at the world differently.
“If you start to talk about it as a commercial journey, we used to in the digital world sort of be satisfied if you will with engaging the consumer throughout her digital journey,” he told me. “But because we just said that the consumer journey is in and out of the physical worlds, presumably across many different devices, the digital experience now has to evolve.”
Ryan Craver, former Senior Vice President, Strategy, of Hudson’s Bay, told me in a The Art of Mobile Persuasion interview that he believes that targeting and retargeting is all about catering to the consumer.
Said Craver, who brought innovation into Lord & Taylor among other efforts: “If you are shopping Armani on your mobile phone, or searching for it on your mobile phone, or on your desktop computer the night before, and then you bring yourself into retailer: as long as you've been asked up front, ‘Are you willing to share your location, are you willing to share past browsing behavior?’ and then the marketer provides the customer something as part of the ad—perhaps a discount or exclusive content or something else--I think people are slowly but surely coming around to understanding that that is the way in which marketing is going to be served. It is also something that you need to pay attention to in terms of how often you send it, and how frequently you come after them.”
Another example of what Craver thought about when he started using beacons to know that opted-in users are in the brick and mortar location: “We thought a lot about cart abandonment online and how frequently we need to do something similar in stores. Certain online stores on cart abandonment, like Amazon, will hit you up the day after, hit you up seven days after, and hit you up maybe two weeks after. There are other stores, like Urban Outfitters, that will even hit you up six months later.”
So Craver and his team set business rules.
“For us as a retailer, when you come in for that Armani, if we hit you once and then we hit you two visits later, we thought that might be a bit alienating and reaching too far back,” he said. “But if it's immediate, meaning it was within the last couple of days, I think it's worthwhile. I think people are becoming desensitized to Big Brother and to this creepiness factor.”
And, surprising to some, people don’t mind being targeting. In fact, under the right circumstances, they might even welcome it.
(article first appeared on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2016/01/18/serving-a-consumer-who-actually-wants-to-be-retargeted/)
More than 170,000 attended CES last week, yet the only one that matters was nowhere to be found among more than 2.5 million square feet of packed aisles and shiny objects.
The consumer doesn’t qualify for entry to the businessperson-only show. And while we would hope that all products – from robots to drones to smart appliances and more – were built based on solid end-user insights, that notion is as likely as 95 percent of what was shown becoming runaway hits.
The most astute comment of the week came from David Pogue, longtime consumer electronics pundit, who said, “CES is not a store; it's an exercise in wishful thinking.”
So what wins?
“The consumer is going to decide,” Sean Lyons, U.S. President of R/GA, told me in an interview for my The Art of Mobile Persuasion book (www.artofmobilepersuasion.com). “I think a lot of these early thoughts about how things will be used are wrong often. And it's not because people aren't intelligent. It's because we haven't really found what the behaviors are yet.”
Said Target CMO Jeff Jones on Facebook:
“The consumer will win with choice for sure…but as of now, people will have to choose a “platform” or an “ecosystem” that they buy into for all of their products. We’ve been here many times…Beta vs VHS, iOS vs Android, Mac vs PC, etc.”
Here are more of my thoughts on what I found in Las Vegas:
Samsung has advanced the concept of a refrigerator with the introduction of the
"Family Hub" unit that enables users to gauge supply and order from a screen in the door that also offers up recipes. There is even a corresponding smartphone app that gives owners in a supermarket or elsewhere a real-time view of what’s on the shelves and what is absent. But the expected $5,000 price tag puts all but the top one-percent or so out in the cold.
Drones and Virtual Reality caught the eye of many show goers. What grabbed my attention was the prediction by the International Robotics Federation of 35 million units of “service robots” to be sold in the next three years.
“Robots are going to be as popular as cars, machines and airplanes,” predicted Alibaba Group Chairman Jack Ma.
Rather than more employing a robot to clean a floor, for instance, the growth is expected to be driven in large part by the introduction of products to provide assistance for the elderly and handicapped.
According to a story published by the Consumer Technology Association, a recent Georgia Institute of Technology study found that a “surprising number” of seniors (aged 63 to 93 years) would prefer to have a robotic assistant for household tasks rather than a human helper.
As expected, there were lots of exercise trackers. But how many not only gauge movement and rates, but provide context on what the numbers mean? None that I saw.
Speaking of trackers, there seemingly every kind of tracker imaginable, but not one that can tell the Browns where Johnny Manziel is - and whether he is in beard and wig.
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(article first published on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2016/01/11/with-the-consumer-absent-much-of-ces2016-was-exercise-in-wishful-thinking/)
If you ask users to opt into push messages during the fourth-to-sixth app session, the opt-in rate is 70%, per Localytics. Why? Because by then you will have established value. Many brands ask too soon and see poor response.
I saw a tweet that said 10 Apps That Every Lazy Person Needs, but I didn’t bother to open it.
Ten billion is the number of price changes Amazon made this past holiday season, according to RetailDive.
The share of parents who know the password to their teen’s email account: 48%; cellphone: 43%, social media account: 35%, per Pew.
My reaction to news that Lenovo is phasing out the Motorola brand: when the Razr was the most popular cellphone, the thought of the brand going away rang untrue.
Apple saw $1.1B spent on apps over the holidays. New Year’s Day was the biggest ever.
Of the 36% of retailers that use mobile devices in stores, 25% use tablets, per the National Retail Federation.
Worldwide time spent in apps grew 334% on phablets YoY from 2014-2015: Flurry.
In 2015, 27% of all activations were on phablets, growing from 4% in 2013.
Gartner says that half of consumers will pay via mobile by 2018.
Mobile purchases will reach 42% of all online orders in 2016, according to Bizrate.
Apptimization is this week’s made-up word. Stop trying so hard. Better yet, try harder.
India has reached one billion mobile users.
The end of apps, eh? Usage grew 58% in 2015, per IBM.
50% of emails sent in the third quarter of 2015 were opened only on smartphones and tablets: Yesmail. That’s up 6% compared with the same period in 2014.
Only 2% of patients in the largest U.S. hospitals are using hospital-provided mobile health apps, per Accenture. The company estimates that failure to meet consumer demand could cost each of these hospitals, on average, more than $100 million in lost annual revenue.
Be it the Internet of Things, the smart home, virtual reality or something else, change is coming.
A year ago, I walked the Las Vegas Convention Center with 150,000 of my closest friends attending the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show. Televisions were impressive, but incremental in benefit to the viewer. Automobiles were not just tricked out with sound, but with connectivity like never before. Smart home hardware was plentiful.
Whether they were solving consumer problems – alerting us that there is a leak under our sink or that our beer supply in the fridge is low – is another question.
I’m heading back to the desert this week to see where innovation has taken us since last year’s show.
Previews of the 2016 show point to the increased availability of smart products, including light bulbs, automobiles, appliances, regulators like the Nest thermostat, and an increasingly present wearable category.
The Consumer Electronics Association says that the wearable tech industry is projected to grow 64 percent over the next three years, reaching $25 billion in 2019 when more than 245 million devices are expected to ship.
The build-out of the wearable market will be in the spotlight on the CES 2016 show floor where the Wearables Marketplace and related lifestyle exhibit areas have more than tripled in size since 2015.
What, if anything, wins?
“The consumer is going to decide,” Sean Lyons, U.S. President of R/GA of Havas, told me in an interview for my The Art of Mobile Persuasion book (www.artofmobilepersuasion.com). “I think a lot of these early thoughts about how things will be used are wrong often. And it's not because people aren't intelligent. It's because we haven't really found what the behaviors are yet.
“Just think about how long it took for something like the video phone call which was introduced in the ‘60s to actually come into use. Even now, we're Skyping (and only using a voice capability). Other people might be doing FaceTime. But it's not main method of communication. What's envisioned is often not what happens. To me that's the fun part, especially for brands. Once you realize that you are not going to be expected to have the answer, and you just kind of feel your way through it, the better that you will be. That's going to allow you to not have the pressure of solving the problem and actually observing.”
How important is the show?
CES 2016 will feature more than 3,600 exhibitors and an impressive list of potential buyers.
In 2015, 82 percent of the Fortune 500 and 83 percent of the top retailers attended what is the largest conference in Las Vegas. Reports this year indicate that level of participation will continue this time around.
One certainty is that there will be an overabundance of hype. Adoption of even the “winning” technologies happens over a period of time.
“The reality is these things don't happen cleanly,” Curtis Kopf, Vice President of Customer Experience for Premera Blue Cross, said to me in an interview for The Art of Mobile Persuasion. “It's not like all of a sudden smartphones are here and everyone has them on day one. It's messy. Emerging technology exists for a long time with existing technologies.”
(article first published on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2016/01/02/one-undeniable-truth-in-two-million-square-feet-of-ces-2016/)
How far have we come – or not? Entering 2016, only four percent of marketers have a single view of their customers, says eMarketer.
Smartphone users will number seven billion in 2020, up from the nearly four billion today, Tune predicts.
On the new or renewed and repeated use of "App-ocalypse" - stop.
Purchasing happened more often from digital channels as U.S. retail sales grew 7.9% in 2015, per MasterCard. Furniture and women's apparel were the leading growth categories.
83% of consumers use 2.23 devices simultaneously with most of them 'feeling good' about it, reported Accenture Interactive. I, for one, always feel that something is lacking from that .23 of a device.
I am up to 26,000 tweets sent. .0000000000000000000000000000000000001% were about my meal choices.
With the mobile wallet, cash was supposed to be gone by Tuesday, no? Maybe some Tuesday in 2023.
My craziest tech moment of 2015 was when I got a “You Did It” Apple Watch message while at a urinal. Come to think of it, it was the best positive re-enforcement since I was 3.
Tabletop tablets enable Olive Garden to turn over tables six-seven minutes faster, the Washington Post reported.
I always gauge mobile adoption when the extended family visits over the holidays. This time around, they want from why to "oh, we'll just take Uber” and “Time to FaceTime with the grandkids cross-country”.
13% of Americans are “smartphone-only” as home broadband plateaus, via Pew. Meanwhile, 55% of U.S. adults have both a smartphone and home broadband subscription.
My best RTs this week – and every week, came from everyone who retweeted. Other yardsticks miss the point.
The equal to the StarWars fanatics are those who consented to push notifications for each score in 42 bowl games.
Google launched a 6-month accelerator to help startups build mobile products.
Why should radio broadcasters care about mobile?
And, more importantly, what strategies should broadcasters employ to stay in tune with their audiences as they adopt mobile and move some or most of their attention and usage to it?
I talked recently with Mark Ramsey, a leading digital strategist for broadcasters. I’ve known Mark since my days at Hipcricket where I worked with dozens of radio stations and groups to drive time spent listening and advertising revenue.
Here are some of the topics we cover in this short video Q&A:
· Why should radio broadcasters care about mobile?
· How can broadcasters leverage mobile?
· Will over-the-air listening migrate to mobile?
· How can broadcasters leverage listener relationships via mobile?
· What’s the difference between mobile websites and mobile apps, and which do you need most?
· Do you even need a mobile app?
The conclusion?
Choice is the killer app. Radio stations need to be wherever consumers want to be and in the forms they prefer. We’re moving away from traditional platforms, but not away from relationships with the stations and personalities that we grew to love on those platforms.
I encourage you to learn more from Mark at http://www.markramseymedia.com
In the world of advertising, one offers up a Snickers bar to solve the problem of “you not being you when you're hungry".
In real life, it’s not grumpiness and an empty stomach that gets in the way of those marketing travel. Instead, it’s the fact that specific motivations call for different decisions. That has the likes of Expedia SVP and Chief Marketing Officer David Doctorow grappling to deliver personalization to a changeable individual.
“After years of trying to crack the mobile code, I would say that it is a fairly humbling battle that we’re fighting,” Doctorow said recently in a Seattle Mobile Mixers event tied to my The Art of Mobile Persuasion book (artofmobilepersuasion.com). “Whatever expectations we had going into 2015 are pretty irrelevant. This game keeps on changing and it makes it a ton of fun.
“One of the things that we’ve really learned over the last year is that you are not always you. When we’re traveling to a business trip in Dallas or in Columbus, Ohio, there are certain things that we might be looking for in a trip. We may want to stay where our meeting is. Maybe we have a budget that we need to operate to. Time probably really matters. Serving up an experience that delivers on that moment is important. But, by contrast, if we are going with our families to Mexico for a beach vacation, there are very, very different things that we’re looking for.”
Doctorow, whose insights are throughout my book, is keen on following signals sent by an individual.
“When it comes to shopping, for these two different trips, we’re probably going to go about it very differently,” he explained at the Mobile Mixers gathering. “If I’m shopping for that business trip, I want to pull out my phone and I want to get the job done. I don’t want to be spending a lot of time on booking. But if I’m shopping for a beach vacation for my family that I might take once or twice a year, I’m going to start in the morning maybe when I’m standing in line waiting for my coffee. I’m going to browse around. Then I’m going to go home that night, and I’m going to lean back on the couch with my tablet and I’m probably going to have my wife next to me and we’re going to look at the options. It may take us a little while and eventually we’ll book on the desktop.
“The price of entry is when I go back on that tablet, when I go back to book on that desktop, we (Expedia) have to recognize who the traveler is, what it is that they care about, and what they were shopping for. If we don’t do that, we’re betraying them and we can’t possibly expect them to be loyal to us. I think the game-changer in 2015 is that that becomes the price of entry rather than a nice to have.”
Expedia is seeking to differentiate in part through what it calls Scratchpad, a tool that remembers searches regardless of the device that a logged-in visitor is on.
Also, Expedia is changing not just the mindset but the job description of many within its organization.
“Mobile in 2016 must become everyone’s job,” he said. “If you go back a year or two ago, there was a mobile team. There is no such thing in 2016 as a mobile team. Mobile is the whole team. That mindshift has to happen and it needs to be accompanied with real behavior changes, real goals changes, real process changes.
“Mobile measurement and cross-device measurement is no longer a nice to have in 2016. If we don’t get this right, it is a serious problem. 2016 is the year that it must be cracked. It is easy to say, but to get it right, is going to be a lot of different things. It’s going to be about data and collecting the right data. It’s going to be about using analytics to determine connections across that data. It’s going to be testing things. All of these things together are going to lead us to make smarter, better capital allocation decisions.”
And hopefully better ways to satisfy the changeable traveler.
(article first appeared on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2015/12/13/personalizing-experiences-for-the-changeable-traveler/)