What Do Mobile Users Really Want From Brands?

Hype, myth and hyperbole live alongside reality in the mobile sphere, making it difficult for marketers to know where to turn. One of my favorites is the belief that mobile payments will be universally adopted ASAP. Some people suggest cash will be gone by Tuesday, which, of course, is nonsense. Just look at history — not only have mobile users been slow to use their devices for banking, but other customers still prefer to interact with tellers. Though you may think they’re in the minority, banks still offer in-person options because the demand is significant.

Do mobile owners actually want anything to do with brands and businesses while their heads are buried in their devices? Judging by the large increase in mobile users downloading ad-blocking software lately, you might discern that the answer is no. However, when you consider the entire population of mobile users, you’ll find your instinct is wrong — there’s still value in mobile marketing, and here’s the proof:

Facebook’s total revenue in Q1 of 2016 grew to $5.38 billion from $3.54 billion in Q4 2015, with ad revenue increasing 57 percent to $5.2 billion. Mobile ad revenue accounted for about 82 percent of total ad revenue, compared with about 73 percent a year earlier. Brands were spending more because the advertising was working.

Then came news that mobile advertising drives $26.52 in incremental sales per thousand impressions for consumer packaged goods brands, topping digital video, TV and cross-media, according to a new report from Nielsen Catalina Solutions. The authors said that with mobile having the lowest frequency across all media, marketers could buy more and still expect strong returns.

Want additional proof? Just under 60 percent of mobile users said they would have a more positive opinion about a retailer if they were provided with coupons and offers that could be saved on their smartphone, per the 2016 Mobile Consumer Report released by Vibes.

And then there’s this one — more than half of millennials would use their phones to leverage restaurant or bar loyalty programs, according to QSR Magazine.

Finally, according to comScore, listeners don’t mind hearing ads during podcasts — and they actually act on them. In a study of US respondents ages 18 to 49, two-thirds of listeners have acted on ads they heard in a podcast either by researching a product or service or by actually purchasing something they heard about in an episode. Of course, many of those listens happen through a mobile device.

Lest you think I’m full of hype, let’s examine the latest ad-blocking statistics and their ramifications.

Ad blocking in the US is expected to grow by double digits this year and next, according to eMarketer. In 2016, 69.8 million people in the US will use some sort of ad blocker, representing an increase of 34.4 percent since 2015. The following year, that number will increase another 24 percent, topping out at 86.6 million people.

Currently, ad blocking is more common on desktops and laptops than on smartphones. However, the number of people using ad blockers on their smartphones will rise 62.3 percent this year, and the number of PC-based ad-blocking users will increase 30.1 percent, according to the source.

So what gives? In “The Art of Mobile Persuasion,” I dive into the personal relationship consumers have with their phones and dissect whether there’s a place for advertising and marketing or whether three is a crowd. Through reviewing thousands of mobile campaigns and interviews with more than a dozen of the world’s leading mobile marketers, the only conclusion to draw was that many mobile users — but not all — are willing and even eager to engage with businesses when they receive value in exchange.

The large and growing number of people blocking ads is due to mobile users being bothered by bad experiences, being fed up with communications from brands that are neither relevant nor contextual, and choosing to keep their relatively small screens uncluttered.

“Crappy ad experiences are behind the uptick in ad-blocking tools, and Google, along with the advertising and publishing industries, is obliged to come up with a fix,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president of Ads and Commerce.

However, the mistake comes when marketers believe the door is closed. By providing better and more personal interactions, brands and businesses can block not just the stream of smartphone owners downloading software, but the hype that does a disservice to a channel that has proven its worth time and again.

(first appeared at http://mobilebusinessinsights.com/2016/07/what-do-mobile-users-really-want-from-brands/)

Blocking Out The Hype Around Ad Blockers

The end of mobile advertising is at hand, driven by device owners falling over themselves to be first to download and run ad blocking products and by the makers of these products who have ridden in to save us from brand message infestation.

Except history tells us that consumers will do nothing of the kind and the software makers who are coming in donning superhero getups have the same ambitions that the brands have – namely making money.

The issue, of course, has come to a head and to our Twitter feeds with the introduction of iOS9. Apple incorporated an ad blocking feature into the Safari web browser, the most widely used mobile browser in the world, with 42 percent of the market share.

To understand just how many will seek out an ad blocking product and do the required homework to know what is protection and what is bluster, I’ll point to the lack of action most consumer users took more than 10 years ago when worms and viruses reared their slimy heads.

Three years after the Love Letter worm infected millions of computers within a few hours, and the Code Red virus and Nimda worm followed with more destruction, Slammer crashed the Internet in 15 minutes in large part because we largely didn’t notice or yawned at such intrusions. Most importantly most didn’t proactively project themselves with Internet security software.

The problem only got better when Microsoft, Apple and others did the protecting for us.

This brings us to those positioning themselves as the savers of the day, the ad blocking companies that appeared in time for the iOS9 introduction.

Slate reported that Adblock Plus, one of the more prominent would-be superheroes, was shown to actually allow companies to pay to have their advertisements slip through its filters.

The free app reportedly began letting 70 companies with about 700 ads evade its blockers.

Worse, The Wall Street Journal said that Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus, “is now reaching out to developers of other ad-blocking tools to cut deals that allow certain ads to pass ads through their filters, too.”

Whether mobile users view ads as a major problem is up for debate. Instead, many instead see brand messages as an extension of what they’ve seen on television, on the web, in print, on radio, and elsewhere.

“Back in the old days, if you looked at the early days of television, there was a very clear connection between the program that you watched and the company that sponsored that program,” Mario Schulzke, a university teacher, founder of IdeaMensch, and an advertising agency leader, told me in an interview for my new book, The Art of Mobile Persuasion.

“Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, there was ‘Gillette Friday Night’ boxing night. Everybody knew that they got to see live boxing on TV because of Gillette. I think in the last 20 years in traditional media that has gotten lost. I don't watch a sports game and see a certain ad and say, ‘I'm thankful that Bud Light is buying these ads because that's why I get to watch this show for free’.”

Schulzke then takes the discussion to the web and to mobile.

“The same is true on the Internet,” he said. “The things that connect us … if you think of Apple, if you think of Google. Think about Google for a second. They've got their email -- we all have our Gmail accounts. None of us pay for Gmail. We get incredible value out of it. None of us pay for Google Calendar. Nobody pays for Facebook. Nobody pays for Twitter. Nobody pays for Instagram. Yet we get so much satisfaction and so much utility out of these tools. The reason for that is that they are going to monetize us commercially.

“I think if you understand that from a consumer perspective, then you get to make the choice whether you don't want to be on Facebook or have a Gmail account.”

Schulzke  discussed the very issue with about 30 of his University of Montana marketing students.

“Everybody thought that it was kind of creepy,” he recalled. “There was a sense of hesitation when they found out that by using your Gmail account and when you log into different services, and logging into Facebook, that you are able to be tracked.

“But then when I asked the question, ‘Would you not go on Facebook, would you give up your Gmail account?’ the answer was a resounding no. I felt like there was this feeling that it was unfair that this is happening but it's just too convenient to stay on these tools. They are free and they are great.”

What they need to be, in the view of Schulzke and other marketers I interviewed, are more transparent.

“I think what's important for companies like Facebook and Google and Apple and these very large platforms is to just educate consumers a little bit about what it is that you're doing and give people some ways to opt in and I opt out,” Schulzke told me. “And you're going to be able to opt out of everything. And most people won't be opted in to everything, either. I think that there will be a little bit of a struggle but being out there and putting out information I think that will be important and it will resolve that. Honestly, I don't think you will be creepy - I think it will be kind of assumed.”

Much as there needs to be a mindset change with those college students, adjustments need to enter the marketing department, too.

“Let's face it,” Schulzke said. “It was all about how can I disrupt you, how can I interrupt you from what you're doing, catch your attention, and somehow persuade you to take whatever action it was that I wanted you to take? I think that's changed.

“I think as marketers if we want to be successful, rather than think about how we're going to disrupt the consumer behavior, we need to think how can we add value to the consumer behavior.”

The bottom line -- if a brand provides something useful to a mobile owner in an ad, app or elsewhere, he or she is more likely to engage than shut off the business – and its ads and marketing.

(article first appeared here - http://mobileleadersalliance.com/2015/09/28/blocking-out-the-hype-around-ad-blocking/)