Five Words To Describe Ineffective Digital Marketers

ESPN, all over your television guide and digital channels, notably uses a yardstick that measures how well as opposed to how many.

“Quality always wins,” Ryan Spoon, ESPN’s Senior Vice President of Digital and Social,  told me in an exclusive interview for my new book, The Art of Digital Persuasion.

“And that pertains to any job. Whether you're creating the content, creating a product, you're distributing the content, marketing it, whatever that might be.”

In the United States, ESPN has eight cable networks and ESPN on ABC. The digital lineup includes ESPN.com; ESPN3; ESPN Fantasy Sports; espnW, ESPNDeportes.com; TheUndefeated.com; plus a group of niche sites. ESPN+ offers thousands of live events, original programs and on-demand content. The company also has a radio network and magazine.

In short, the brand is seemingly everywhere.

ESPN has certainly made mistakes. Who can forget the ill-advised ESPN MVP phone? Then there have been the company’s missteps around digital and too many apps. It has taken until recently for ESPN to hone in on what fans really want – personalized experiences tailored to the digital channel.

Is the strategy working?

ESPN Digital ranked as the No. 1 U.S. digital sports property in February across every key metric. The network reached 88.4 million unique visitors (up +21% YOY) for its best February on record.

The ESPN mobile app was once again ranked as the No. 1 sports app in the U.S., attracting 18.5 million unique visitors and 1.3 billion minutes, up +24% and +33%, respectively YOY. ESPN Digital also was No. 1 in total minutes with 4.3 billion, which was 1.7 billion more than No. 2 Yahoo-NBC Sports (2.6 billion), and with an average minute audience of 106,000, out-delivering No. 2 Yahoo-NBC Sports (64,000).

Still, it’s less about more and more about excellence.

“I don't know the best way to say it other than just a general mantra, and that’s fewer things done better,” Spoon told me.

In other words, failure often comes when you overextend.

There are four additional words gleaned from my interviews to slap on ineffective marketers: 

Unrealistic

Identify a proven innovator and I’ll guarantee that the road to success had more than a few bumps. The smart ones know that is to be expected. We can only make our best judgments, do what we can, and hope for the best.   

“Everyone has to be relatively sober-minded when evaluating the possibility of a what might come in the future and realize that for all of us who are trying to predict what can happen, we're all partially right and partially wrong,” Aaron Price, Senior Vice President of Global Marketing, told me. 

Misguided

To those seeking clarity on the question of when they will master digital marketing, Google’s Jason Spero believes that it is all tied to delivering for consumers.

“It's likely the question of when we get to the finish line might be the wrong metaphor,” Spero, Vice President, Performance Media, explained to me. “But rather how do we recognize consumers’ expectations and how might we be able to serve her needs in a way where she may not see the technology, but she's delighted by the experience?”

Lackadaisical

Maybe next year is a mindset that frankly will get you fired. Think instead of what you can get done today in the area of digital persuasion.

“We don't have 10 years to figure it out, we've got 10 minutes,” global tech marketing strategist Tamara McCleary told me. “We are all wondering where to place our next step. We are all walking on top of quicksand, and we have to be hyper-vigilant about the steps we take. But at the same time, we also can't hold back because we could be completely disrupted if we aren't moving forward.”

Confused

Do not think for a second that gaining an understanding of today’s emerging technologies is the end game. There surely are more changes to come behind it.

So how does one cope with that prospect?

“There's going to be a lot more innovation and disruptors,” Stacy Minero, Head of Content Creation at Twitter, said to me. “I’m not sure how it will play out.  I do think that great stories that are rooted in human insight and strike a cultural chord will be sustainable forever.”

In summary, the 12 leaders interviewed shared beliefs that the task is neither easy nor for the faint of heart. Still, there was a persistent theme that there has been no better time to be a marketer, a notion embraced only by those who choose to ride the winds of change rather than get blown over by them.

Neiman Marcus Teaches Us To Differentiate Or Else

To believe that Dallas-based Neiman Marcus first discovered innovation in its second century is to make an error approximately the size of Texas.

One can go all the way back to the day it opened in 1907 to see evidence of the retailer’s forward thinking and acting.

It was the first to offer upscale fashion to the state’s wealthy, according to Wikipedia.

In 1927, Neiman Marcus premiered the first weekly retail fashion show in the United States.

Its history of innovation is deep and while nearly everything around it has changed, the retailer has survived in large part by its boldness.

“A company like Neiman Marcus didn't manage to survive one hundred and 10 plus years without being innovative,” Scott Emmons, the longtime head of the company’s innovation lab (or ‘I Lab’), told me in an exclusive interview for my new book, The Art of Digital Persuasion. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Digital-Persuasion-Innovative-Technologies-ebook/dp/B07NPCXMFJ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=art+of+digital+persuasion&qid=1554466174&s=gateway&sr=8-1

“It’s not like innovation just got invented over the last 10 years because there were iPhones.”

Yes, on one hand, you can argue that Neiman Marcus has been there, done that. But these are extraordinary times for the retail industry. Brick and mortar stores by the thousands are shutting down. Businesses are needing to compete based on not just price, but on such factors as the ability to deliver purchases in two days or less and through the use of technology that digitally puts such things as eyeglasses on one’s face, a dining room table in one’s house, and product reviews in the palm of one’s hands.

“What we're seeing is how quickly the new disruptive ideas keep coming at businesses, and their efforts to keep up with that rate of change, be more agile, and be able to bring new ideas to the table faster,” Emmons said.

Those ideas have led to emerging tech such as voice, augmented and other flavors of reality, artificial intelligence, and more.

When I asked Emmons for advice for marketers, he preached a path of managed risk.

“There is a real temptation to go out and try that bright and shiny thing just because it's cool and everybody is talking about it, and there is all kind of buzz around it,” Emmons said.

“But in the end, you go back to the simple question of what kind of projects should we be tackling. Does it solve a real problem? Or let it evolve from being a solution looking for a problem to something that can solve a problem that you've identified that you have. That's how I look at it.”

When it comes to ROI, one size does not fit all.

“I think the type of projects that we work on are varied enough that those metrics tend to be different,” Emmons told me before leaving Neiman Marcus to join TheCurrent Global consultancy. “If you're working on an RFID project, maybe our metric is did we get our level of inventory accuracy to ‘X’ percent and because our inventory accuracy was better, we lifted sales by this much. You can apply actual traditional lift measurement to see how well something is performing.

“Then you have other types of experiences that have never been done before. And the amount of work it takes to actually tie it back into your transactional systems is large. And so it may be worth it just to try that experience and see if the customers like it, and observe how they interact with it, and sort of take a test drive and not necessarily have a defined ROI on it.”

Others I interviewed offered invaluable advice as well:

ESPN, all over your television guide and digital channels, notably uses a yardstick that measures how well as opposed to how many.

“Quality always wins,” Ryan Spoon, ESPN’s Senior Vice President of Digital and Social, told me. “And that pertains to any job. Whether you're creating the content, creating a product, you're distributing the content, marketing it, whatever that might be.”

To those seeking clarity on the question of when they will master digital marketing, Google’s Jason Spero believes that it is all tied to delivering for consumers.

“It's likely the question of when we get to the finish line might be the wrong metaphor,” Spero, Vice President, Performance Media, explained to me. “But rather how do we recognize consumers’ expectations and how might we be able to serve her needs in a way where she may not see the technology, but she's delighted by the experience?”

What I learned in writing The Art of Digital Persuasion is that successful businesses and marketers innovate to differentiate. The first action for you to take is to place that 2018 marketing playbook in the trash. That was then. The question is what are you going to do now?

How "Out With The Old" Can Leave You Out In The Cold

Artificial. Virtual. Augmented. Machine-driven.

These and other words have entered the marketer’s lexicon.

Out with the old. In with the new.

Or not.

“There's going to be a lot more innovation and disruptors,” Stacy Minero, Head of Content Creation at Twitter, told me in an exclusive interview for my new book, The Art of Digital Persuasion. https://amzn.to/2KmpMz7

“I’m not sure how it will play out.  I do think that great stories that are rooted in human insight and strike a cultural chord will be sustainable forever.”

Of course, human insight has been key for marketers for generations. Minero appreciates the introduction of algorithms but sees them as an element in the modern marketing mix rather than a game-changing end-all.

“You're never going to take humans out of the creative process,” she said. “That’s because ideas come from understanding mindset and motivation and universal human truths. But I think technology will continue to up our game in terms of optimization, everything from understanding what hair color resonates in a video to the type of product and packaging you should showcase in a shot.”

Here are three more lessons learned during my half-year of spending time with a dozen digital marketing pioneers.

Participate Rather Than Only Observe

The decades-old concept of focus groups shouldn’t be dismissed even today. However, one expert strongly told me that we need to not just hear others talk about emerging technology, we should experience it ourselves.

“I've always been someone who likes to ‘live in the future’ and I’ve been fortunate enough to have roles where I’m working with cutting edge technology and then going out and speaking to others about what the impacts are,” explained Dave Isbitski, Amazon’s Chief Evangelist, Alexa & Echo.

“That means constantly looking at new technology trends, learning how they apply to our lives, and in the end teaching people what that future may look like. It helps generate people’s ideas and then they run with it.  For a marketer, tech adoption is no different than any other topic. Keep on top of the latest buzz and trends, look at what the community is saying, whether through social media or at networking events, and start to use the latest technology in your own life.”

The learnings, Isbitski told me, are invaluable.

“Not being a late adopter can have tremendous benefit here,” he said. “I’ve talked to marketers who have been using Alexa since 2015 and the ideas they have for what conversations are possible are very different than someone who has never used a device at all.

“Using early versions of technology today can give you a vision for what tomorrow may look like.”

Remember History When It Comes To Adoption

“Any transformative technology encounters challenges to mainstream adoption in its early lifetime, such as cost, size, comfort, and technical barriers,” Microsoft’s Lorraine Bardeen, General Manager Studio Manager, Mixed Reality, told me. “We’ve seen this all before with the very first computers, the Internet, and mobile phones.”

Bardeen said that B2B usage commonly precedes B2C acceptance. That is why she is bullish on Microsoft’s HoloLens progress that has come with business growth.

“Just like the evolution of other similar technology, we expect momentum for the technology to begin in the commercial space and then trickle outward to consumers,” she said.

Microsoft’s Bardeen forecasts a place for all flavors of reality, including mixed, augmented and virtual.

“We believe that these are not separate concepts, but rather labels for different points on a mixed reality continuum,” she said. “The reality is that if one succeeds, then the ecosystem succeeds, and we’re interested in further education and adoption of the spectrum as a whole.

“Specific to marketing, this technology allows marketers to engage with their audiences in new interactive and immersive ways. The possibilities truly are limitless.”

Think Experience Rather Than Technology

Google’s Jason Spero has a healthy respect for technology. He, however, sees it more as an enabler than a story in and of itself.

“The consumer doesn't see the technology,” the Vice President, Performance Media, explained to me. “What the consumer sees is that they should be able to continue their game from a tablet to a mobile phone. That is a logical, rational, human thought.

“And so the better we can do in our research of studying those expectations of consumers, of understanding the moments where they expect things of us, and then drag the technology along with us kicking and screaming, we need to build those experiences.”

 In summary, the digital leaders interviewed rely as much on the lessons of the past than the vision of the future. We would be wise to follow down that path.

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(first appeared on Mobile Marketer - https://bit.ly/2X0AmgG)

What 10 Years of Mobile Marketing Has Taught Us About the Next 10

There is no such thing as The Year of Mobile. This phrase is used often, but it really has been a process that’s spanned nearly a decade, and is only just beginning. Consider this: in 2010, there was an estimated 62.6 million smartphone users in the United States. That number has risen to 222.9 million in 2017 and is projected to hit 264.3 million by 2021.

In 2015, Salesforce reported that 68 percent of companies integrated mobile marketing into their overall marketing strategy.

This is how Jason Spero, Google’s Vice President of Performance Media, looks at mobile’s path to today:

Before and including 2011, sure, you could run mobile ads, build mobile loyalty clubs, and more, but marketers in large numbers were not ready to dive in.

By 2012, mobile marketing efforts led to more sales and deeper engagement. But, in large part, those who were participating were considered early adopters with room in the club for many others.

By 2013, mobile’s value to marketers had been proven. The questions shifted from why to how, with many choices and decisions to make.

By 2014, those who had not done mobile or had just dabbled in it felt a sense of urgency. Not only were competitors often times eating their lunch, customers had moved to mobile devices. The percentage of companies optimizing email for mobile devices saw an increase of 22 percent in 2014 alone.

Beginning in 2015 and continuing today, the mobile user has established expectations—and they’re growing every day. A marketer’s job is to meet and beat those expectations.

Where are we 10 years into the mobile marketing era?

Some are doing it well. Others, not so much.

5 Reasons Marketers Fail

Here are five words to describe the brand marketers that are failing on mobile:

1. Selfish. If you're reaching out to mobile users, you had better be answering their needs and desires, not simply fulfilling your own.

Jonathan Stephen, who drove innovative mobile programs at JetBlue, points to the greed of some brands that seek to needlessly uncover such inconsequential details as how many sweeteners wireless owners put in their coffee and if they use Splenda or Truvia. Unless you are an artificial sweetener company looking to grab more market share, this information is extraneous and prying.

2. Illogical. Common sense deserves more credit than it gets.

For example, why create only an iPhone app if your customers are mostly or completely Android owners? That's just dumb. But it happens. Smart marketers rely solely on their own business's customer insights to power their programs, and to address the specific behaviors exhibited.

3. Timid. Seize the day.

Hank Wasiak has been marketing for more than five decades. He is among the most accomplished in the field, but when he looks in the mirror, he says that he sees someone who has often moved too slowly when change was needed. The ad executive's lesson for mobile marketers? Seize the day and think bigger. "With mobile, you get not only into the pocket of a consumer, you can get into one's heart," he says.

4. Impulsive. Watching, tracking, and responding to consumer trends--these are tools of the patient, humble, and successful marketer.

If your brand is struggling, perhaps those are tools you are not using enough. Sean Lyons, R/GA U.S. president, chides marketers who go to such conferences as South by Southwest seeking to determine which products and services will matter. The better approach? Don’t try to predict. Rather, discover and monitor. Consumers are going to decide what matters, and you need to be ready to rapidly respond as they do.

5. Inattentive. Every interaction—or inaction—can teach you something, if you're paying attention.

Spero calls consumer actions on mobile devices "signals," rich with information that can tell marketers a great deal if they are on the lookout for them.

5 Qualities of a Successful Marketer

Conversely, successful business leaders like Spero offered advice on the kind of relationship-building mobile marketing that is driving their success:

1. Be Pragmatic. Mobile has changed everything about marketing—and yet it's changed nothing.

We still need to sell stuff. It's merely the how that is different. Identify the business results you want and design your efforts to those ends. It's easy to be distracted by the pixie dust and possibilities in the digital arena. Filter the possible through the lens of what's wise.

2. Knock Gently. Mobile users are a lot more open to interactions with brands than many marketers believe—but the efforts need to be respectful.

Just because customers invite you into their homes doesn't mean you get to put your feet on the furniture, or stay all night. This means no 3 a.m. text messages for a dollar off a burger. And no push notifications every three minutes while someone is shopping. Less is more.

3. Simplify Life. Mobile is for action.

A theme that emerged often in conversation with mobile's best thinkers: Mobile should drive action. To do that, eliminate the unwanted. Beyond his or her mom, name one person who wants to read the bio of a company's CFO on a mobile website. List store hours, provide directions to your location, make purchases easy—whatever action your customer needs to take. Forget the rest.

4. Prize the Relationship. Just as you would with a spouse or other loved one, work daily to make the interaction even richer.

Businesses have extensive information available about many of their customers. For instance, purchase data that shows what generated a response from a mobile ad or offer can give a look into the desires of a wireless user. Wise mobile marketers interpret these signals and get even more personal with tailored outreach to individual customers that proves the brand’s value.

5. Get Better. It's called mobile, right? So keep moving.

Your efforts to reach mobile users should always be evolving. You may feel you are performing well today, but you should constantly be seeking new products or technologies that enhance the mobile experience. Maybe it's a better way to tell a traveler that his or her gate has changed, or an easier way for someone to find and save a mobile coupon. We all need to be better tomorrow than we are today. And it’s what mobile users expect and demand.

Without question, the next 10 years will be more important than the last. Marketing Land projects that mobile advertising will represent 72 percent of all U.S. digital ad spending by 2019. It behooves us to take the learnings from the last decade and perform to levels exceeding our users’ expectations.

(article first appeared here - https://www.simplilearn.com/what-mobile-marketing-taught-us-article)

Serving A Consumer Who Actually Wants To Be Targeted

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/)

Are We In the Mobile Immaturity Phase?

By every yardstick, including smartphones purchased, megabytes of data used, and sales generated, mobile is making historic advancements. A study by Flurry said that smartphone adoption has been 10 times as fast as the consumer reception to the personal computer.

During the 2014 holiday shopping season, wireless devices were the conduit to meaningful dollars for retailers and other businesses. In fact, smartphones and tablets accounted for more than a third of online sales on Christmas Day as well as 57 percent of all online traffic.

Sales made from Amazon’s smartphone app doubled year over year. An impossible-to-ignore 60 percent of Amazon customers shopped on a mobile device.

Still, we were left with the impression that, while marketers were in the game, they weren’t all in.

I wrote extensively about the state of mobile marketing in my new The Art of Mobile Persuasion book. I’ll share several insights from my interviews, but first let me point to a new Forrester Research report that says that mobile maturity is rare among marketers.

An alarming (my word, not Forrester’s) 44 percent are still shrinking desktop experiences for smaller screens, 42 percent put mobile first, and only 14 percent are truly transforming the customer experience.

“The best mobile experiences provide their users with immediate value from the moment they download and open the application,” Deanna Laufer, analyst at Forrester Research and lead author on the report called The Best of Mobile User Experience 2015. “These leaders prioritize relevant functionality and perform reliably throughout the experience.

“The laggards? They hassle customers with unnecessary content and disappoint – or crash – in moments of need.”

 Forrester’s attributes of leading mobile experiences include delivering clear value, optimizing efficiency and simplifying presentation.

The research company recommends that marketers serious about improving their mobile experience develop a strategic focus, maintain dedicated mobile resources, keep design and development teams small and schedule regular product releases.

Most marketers still do not understand how mobile fits into the customer journey across devices and channels, according to Forrester.

When customers encounter a poor mobile app, 47 percent will use a different app with similar functionality, 35 percent will delete it and 15 percent will not use it.

 “The majority of smartphone and tablet owners – 68 percent –have attempted to make a purchase on their device,” Ms. Laufer said. “But two-thirds have failed to complete a transaction because of obstacles encountered during checkout.

“No wonder conversion rates on smartphones linger below 1 percent,” she said. “Although retailers report that their site conversion rates are only a few points higher at 2.7 percent, that difference equates to an extra $80 billion for retailers in 2015.”

Google’s Jason Spero has a more half-full view.

“I see acceleration,” Spero, Google’s Vice President of Performance Media, told me in an interview for The Art of Mobile Persuasion. “Here’s how I would tell you this. I’m thinking of the names in my narratives. In 2011, my narrative was called ‘Why Mobile?’ In 2012, my overarching starting place was ‘It’s Not Too Late To Be Early.’ In 2013, the narrative was ‘Moving From Why To How.’ People getting out of why the heck should I do this to what the heck do I do?

“In 2014, I don’t know that I had a name for it. But I started to see marketers feeling urgency. If I were to name it, I would say, ‘Growing Urgency or Broad Urgency.’ In 2015, I think we’re reaching an understanding of all the different actions that people are taking on these devices.”

And that, Spero said, is finally getting brands mobilized in a serious way.

“Marketers everywhere are waking up and feeling urgency around the understanding that for some of their consumers, this is the only place that they engage in, especially younger people and in developing markets,” Spero told me.

“For many of their consumers, the consumer is choosing to do much of the engage- ment on the mobile device.

“If I were to name 2015, I’d say it’s “We’ve Achieved Urgency’ around delivering on consumers’ mobile expectations.”

Del Monte’s Mac Tillman, Director, Media Strategy and Planning, believes that the new age of mobile and digital calls for smarts, good instincts and better measurement.

“We know mobile is important in the pre-shop experience, in the store, and in the post-shop experience,” Tillman told me. “We also know that if you don’t get it right, what was supposed to be a solution becomes an annoyance. ‘You’re getting in the way of me and my objective.’ You need to understand what the consumer wants from you.

“For instance, Del Monte has what we call the Healthy Explorer. They look to cook. What defines them is experimental cooking. On mobile, they are looking for recipes. They know the ingredients of chili that they’ve made in the past, but we can offer them a great chili recipe where they can take it up a notch with a can of corn to add texture and sweetness. Then you can deliver an offer. If you provide an offer out of context, it’s transactional just like the person who is giving out coupons in the front of the store.”

But mobile measurement limitations have been a barrier for some.

“You can measure advertising, consumer purchases, Sunday FSIs (free standing inserts),” Tillman said. “Digital doesn’t have a long history of analytics. We struggle in the red zone—from the 20-yard line to the goal line. We’re doing different things in different platforms.

“In the new emerging media, if it feels right and lines up with the brands and the company, and you can keep the risk low, you can get out and learn,” he said. “Brands need to have ideas as well as products.

“All of us are trying to figure it out—how to be part of a consumer’s life and not to be intrusive. That’s the biggest challenge we face. There’s complexity in marketing because it’s driven by many channels. We need more content—you can’t just use a 30-second commercial everywhere. On mobile, you have to think if a consumer wants a 15-second commercial even for a product that they like.

“But managing increased complexities has made us better marketers.”

Better? Perhaps. Mature? Not so fast.

(article first appeared here - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2015/10/25/are-we-in-the-mobile-immaturity-phase/)

Five Words To Describe Ineffective Mobile Marketers

Google’s Jason Spero refers to consumer actions on mobile devices as signals, rich with information that tells marketers a great deal if they are on the lookout for them.

“I have more marketers that I'm convincing to be curious about those signals than marketers who are overusing those signals to the point of abuse (like invading privacy),” Spero, Google Vice President of Performance Media, told me in an exclusive interview for my new book, The Art of Mobile Persuasion.

“My problem isn't that marketers are afraid to use those signals because they over-respect them or think the consumers don't want it. My bigger problem is marketers that still don't know how to action the most basic capabilities in mobile. We have all the signals we need to deliver a great UX (user experience). But we've got a heck of a lot of work to do to get there.”

Beyond inattentive, there are four additional words to slap on ineffective mobile marketers.

Impulsive

Another highly successful marketer on the global stage chides those who go to such conferences as South By Southwest and unilaterally seek to determine which products and services will matter.

 “The consumer is going to decide,” said Sean Lyons, Global Chief Digital Officer at Havas told me. “A lot of these early thoughts about how things will be used are often wrong. 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 our main method of communication. What's envisioned is often not what happens. To me that's the fun part, especially for brands.”

So what is a marketer to do?

“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 you will be,” Lyons said. “That's going to allow you to not have the pressure of solving the problem. You should be simply observing.”

Selfish

Much like the ill-advised race in 2007 to build an iPhone app, many marketers have taken on Big Data more to check a box than to get closer to a business outcome.

The wise ones know better.

“There needs to be a specific need that benefits the customer,” Jonathan Stephen, who drove innovative mobile programs at JetBlue, said to me. “We should not be selfish in our endeavors to reach customers. I think we get very greedy with big data.

“If possible, we want to know what our customer had for breakfast. We want to know how many sugars that they put in their coffee and if they used Splenda or Truvia or whatever.  There’s this grasp for data and the funny thing is people (marketers) find out that they don’t even know what to do with that data.”

Timid

Several of the leaders who I spoke to said that sitting back and doing nothing about the migration of customers to mobile devices could be even more harmful to your business than making the wrong choices in these relatively early days.

Coca-Cola, one of the world’s most recognizable, beloved, and successful brands, isn’t being passive. Instead, it is fulfilling its long-established mission in an increasingly-large part through the use of wireless devices.

“Our mobile strategy was really articulated in the 1920s when Robert Woodruff described the role of The Coca-Cola Company as putting our brands within the arm’s reach of desire,” Tom Daly, Group Director, Global Director, Mobile and Search, told me. “The only thing that is different today is that at the end of that arm, between it and desire, is a mobile device.

“To the degree that strategy is a choice, the choice that we are making is to have mobile enable desire. The alternative is to do nothing and have mobile become a barrier. That doesn’t sound smart.”

Illogical

In this mobile era, there are two essential questions to ask and answer. One, would a particular mobile initiative enable me to reach or get closer to my business goal? Two, what is in it for my customer or prospect?

“In determining new capabilities, whether it's technology, design or overall customer experience, we really are look for a customer benefit,” Sean Bartlett, Director of Digital Experience, Product, & Omni-channel Integration for Lowe’s, revealed to me. “We saw this recently with Touch ID (a fingerprint recognition feature designed and released by Apple) where there was a clear customer benefit to allowing people to log into their account using their fingerprint.  Passwords are an archaic way of authenticating, or validating, someone's ID and people still have trouble with them. They use various email addresses.

“We look for clear customer benefit, not a huge technical hurdle, and the value that it could bring to the customer and the business.”

I’ll offer one more word to describe the commonality in the more than dozen business leaders who I interviewed for The Art of Mobile Persuasion. Pragmatic.

Doing anything less will make you ineffective or even out of work.

(article first appeared at http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/5-words-describe-ineffective-mobile-marketers-166097)

With The Mobile Money Flowing, It’s Time To Correct Some Mistakes

We can debate the exact definition of meaningful dollars, but we all have to agree that the projected $100 billion in mobile ad spend in 2016 would fit into that category.

For perspective, an expenditure that large would account for more than 50 percent of all digital ads for the first time, according to eMarketer, which is offering up the figures. And it would pencil out to a 400 percent increase from 2013. Those dollars don’t even include money devoted to mobile marketing for activities after the click or install.

I’ll call the $100 billion figure both a milestone and a reason to pause. Certainly much is going well in mobile’s progression into the mainstream. But I can point to five mistakes that are keeping us from reaching greater heights.

First, we spend too much time seeking out the so-called “mobile user” when we know, in the United States, at least, the great majority of our customers and prospects bounce from device to laptop to tablet and back, many times a day. Our programs need to account for that customer journey. As Google’s Jason Spero told me for my upcoming book, The Art of Mobile Persuasion, a meaningful (there’s that word again) group of our customers and prospects expect brands to take this interest into account and enable the resumption of a task like searching when one leaves one piece of hardware and heads to another.

Second, we mostly fail when it comes to including a mobile call to action in traditional media, especially television and big-time events like the Super Bowl. Regular readers may remember that I’ve repeatedly incorrectly forecast a mobile call to action in the multi-million dollar TV spots on the NFL’s big day. Again this year, we were left with ads that came right out of the 1970s. But I actually have renewed hope for next year after seeing Coca-Cola spend television time during the Final Four to pour Coke Zero and give mobile users an offer via Shazam.

Third, we are still seeing marketers make ill-advised mobile decisions because the fail to start with consumer insights. Studies from Pew, comScore, Nielsen and the rest are fine, but it’s all about what your customers and prospects and their wants and behaviors. In my Mobilized Marketing book, Steve Mura from MillerCoors told us of his early disinterest in marketing via iPhones. Why? Mura’s customers are young males who demand choice and they didn’t take to the first wave of iPhones that were only available through one mobile carrier and with limited options on price and features. What do your customers want? Are you giving it to them?

Fourth, many marketers continue to be fascinated by shiny objects. Live video streams through Meerkat or Periscope may eventually enable brands to drive awareness, consideration, and sales, but at this point, the streaming experience is full of shaky, uninteresting user-generated views that leave us thinking that there are better places to spend our time. Instead, prudent marketers are spending on proven products and tactics like mobile loyalty clubs that are only going to become more valuable as we bring to market smarter, efficient ways to personalize.

Finally, for the most part, we remain in marketing silos. The mobile discipline is increasingly part of many organizations, but only a few, including Google and Lowe’s, are doing away with the channel distinctions in favor of a more holistic business unit.  As Sean Bartlett, ‎Director of Digital Experience, Product, & Omni-channel Integration at Lowe's, told me for The Art of Mobile Persuasion, “the folks at the forefront are going to collapse those mobile teams back into the base business so that you just have a digital organization, or a customer experience organization, and mobile is just how you do business and it's no longer becomes this specific talking point. It's just the assumption of how business operates.”  

In case you are thinking that I got out on the wrong side of the bed, I can easily point to five things that we’re doing well with mobile. Those will serve us well as we seek to prove that our $100 billion annual spend is justified and even lower than it should be.

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Article first appeared on Mobile Marketer - http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/20186.html

Are You Successful If 5-7% of Your Customers Engage Through Mobile?

Google’s Jason Spero, up there with Mary Meeker as a “must-hear” speaker on mobile activity and where we are headed, recently chided the industry for focusing so much on app installs.

He also said that while a brand that sees 5-7% of its customers being reached by mobile is labeled a success, there is an opportunity for much more if marketers would give consumers more ways to “take action”.

“My fear is that we as an industry have over-indexed on app installs as the goal, when what we need to focus on is the mobile consumer who wants to solve real-world problems like booking a flight or buying makeup,” Spero, Google's VP of Performance Media, said in a keynote at the M1 Summit in San Francisco.

“There is so much revenue to be made for an app install, but it's a very small part of what is going on for consumers in mobile. It’s about recognizing that moment and recognizing what they want and need in that moment”.

Spero (@speroman) pointed to what he called ”fundamental consumer behavior changes”, adding that they are “planning, researching, buying and finding on mobile.

“Think about how you serve broader action on mobile.”

Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, often comments on the disparity between consumer time spent on mobile and marketing dollars that go to the channel. More money surely will come when outcomes can be identified, affected, and tracked.

Some companies that Spero mentioned that are seeing success:

-  Progressive, which has begun to do predictive rendering that takes into account an individual’s history. For example, if a consumer has filed an insurance claim, that information gets prominent placement when the brand is reached on a mobile device.

-  1-800 Contacts, a company that has simplified it form fill to make it easy to get a new supply of contact lens, and an app that solves a pain point by enabling a consumer to process an order by taking and uploading a picture of a prescription.

He named satisfaction, dreaming, and motivation as reasons that we all use mobile and said that as an industry,  "we are just now grasping the opportunity".

Among other comments that caught my attention at the conference:

-  During a panel on CRM, there was considerable talk about personalization and the so-called “creepy” factor where mobile users feel that their privacy is invaded. The definition of creepy was all over the board, including this one from Appboy CEO Mark Ghermezian -- “Customers are expecting personalization. If you’re not personalizing and telling them what they want to hear, that’s when you are creeping them out.” That, in my opinion, is case dependent. For instance, we don’t want a brand knowing that we are at the dentist, nor do we want a company to send us an offer when we’re in the chair. That, to most, is TMI and out of bounds.

-  Bill Gross, the founder and CEO of Idealab, said that mobile will be bigger than keyword advertising. "The smartphone is the biggest disruption to retail since the automobile, and it's just getting started."

(first posted on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2014/11/16/are-you-successful-if-5-7-of-your-customers-engage-through-mobile/)

Notes From A Mobilized Marketer - Why A One-Channel Marketing Strategy Will Fail You

Here are words of caution to those marketers who live in a one-channel world. Consumers aren’t anything like you.

The latest evidence comes from the automotive industry. While smartphones and tablets accounted for 40% of total Web traffic for the car space in October (Dealertrack), a large portion of consumers migrated to a computer to fill out a form. This led to a 32% increase in lead captures.

Meanwhile, 1-800 Contacts has advanced in mobile due to the simplification of the form fill, as well as the ability for a consumer to take a picture of a prescription, according to Google’s mobile lead Jason Spero (@speroman).

Stride Rite has introduced an iPad app that measures a kid’s shoe size. It’s a smart and efficient way to solve a parent’s problem.

Nearly 50% of consumers believe their personal mobile devices are more efficient than store associates in helping them make buying decisions, Motorola reports.

Approximately 456 million Facebook members only access the network via mobile.

U.S. online adults are three times more likely to visit your website than engage with your brand on Facebook, per Forrester.

35% of holiday email click-throughs will happen on mobile, IBM forecasts.

Wal-Mart will match Amazon's prices in stores this holiday season.

The lack of smartphones held back Shazam pre-iPhone, according to a company executive appearing at the M1 Summit. You used to request and get an SMS with the name of a song.

75% of Pandora listening is on mobile, the company says.

The gap increases between mobile leaders and laggards in 2015, Forrester forecasts.

A new Usher song is available via download with info at the bottom of a box of Cheerios.

Folks with incomes lower than $100,000 a year plan to do more in-store shopping, according to Deloitte.

75% of HR managers say mobile HR can build satisfaction, per ADP.