Justin Baird, founding partner of Aegis innovation unit Jumptank, sparked a lively debate last night with the controversial statement: "Mobile advertising is dead."
Baird, who sat on the Mobile Jury at Cannes, was speaking at Mobile Generation, the first combined event put on by the MFA's NGen and The Comms Council's Youngbloods.
He said agencies which try to use the traditional disruption model on mobile were missing the point – that out of the 100 shortlisted Mobile Lions entries, "only two were advertisements".
The stand-out campaigns, epitomised by the Mobile Grand Prix winner, DDB Manila's 'TXTBKS' for Philippines telco Smart Communications, embraced the concept of "shared value".
"From a user perspective, there's no more room for innovation [in mobile advertising]," Baird said. "The only thing you can do is remove the [banner] ads altogether to give the user back one eighth of screen real estate."
It's all about creating engaging experiences, taking advantage of the "intimate" nature of mobile to offer utility or entertainment – like Party Tokyo's 'World Wide Maze' for Google Chrome, which turns any website into a mobile-controlled marble maze-style game.
Brendan 'Bob' Forster, Google Australia's creative agency lead, took the view that "mobile advertising is not dead – everything has its place" as long as everything is integrated and "the messages make sense" across every platform. Google would probably take that view. After all, it's quite big on search advertising.
But he agreed that any mobile work should be tailored to account for the highly personal nature of the smartphone. "We find people search very differently on the PC to how they search on mobile," he said.
"You can reach people in very personal moments on their phone. FMCG brands are all over this. Because the PC is a very communal device in the home, they don't do that many personal searches. But on mobile – hooly dooly."
Rob Hall, managing director of mobile sales house Big Mobile, said there had to be a balance between traditional disruption advertising and the deeper experiences Baird referred to.
He said the bread-and-butter work that "paid the bills" was still essential, and it was hard to do the loftier, more engaging work "at scale to move product" and hit traditional targets like reach and awareness.
With Collective's head of design and user experience, Paul Kelly, pointed out that, like kids who accidentally click on mobile ads when using their parents' phone because "it's colourful and they haven't learned to recognise it's an ad and to ignore it yet", people would eventually begin to feel the same about the kind of work Baird espoused.
Steve Weaver, network research director of Nine Entertainment Co., said the "traditional format of advertising is dead" but that it was "constantly evolving and will never go away – it's here to stay". In terms of TV, he pointed to in-program as one new battleground.
"We're stacking brands in there left, right and centre. It's not the traditional, oh I'm just going to pull out my Dulux and paint the wall. Because we're all consumers, and we all get pissed off at that stuff. We're not dickheads."
Echoing Forster's comments, Weaver presented research showing campaigns with "creative integration" across all three platforms as opposed to just a straight retail-style execution on mobile consistently delivered better results.
Adam Faulkner, head of alliances and strategic business for BlackBerry, said before worrying about granular details like whether you develop an app or a website, you must have a clear idea of your end goal the "pain point" you're trying to address.
But the key point, emphasised by all the speakers: mobile is no longer a why question. Everyone knows it's here, and it's happening. The question is how. And Faulkner's advice? Get your MVP, or minimum viable product, out to market as soon as possible.
"It's very easy to get caught up in analysis paralysis. Just get something out there. Iteration and refinement will come with feedback and users."
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