Facebook’s Mark D’Arcy spoke to AdNews last week about the need to build advertising creative for a mobile-first world. But building creative with a mobile lens is only one part of the solution.
It's been said that someone who can tell you how the world is going to turn out is called a futurist, but that someone who can tell you when is called a billionaire. And as of today, our planet is home to more self-made billionaires per capita than at any other point in history. It's clear the world around us is changing at a rapid pace. It took the humble telephone 75 years to be accessible by 50 million people, a feat Facebook accomplished in just two years. Which seems impressive, except Pokemon Go knocked this over in just 19 days.
The fact is, if you aren't reading this on a mobile device or at least have one within arms reach, you're very much in the minority. It's a trend we can easily observe in social situations, but if you think it hasn't translated commercially you're behind the times. Snap Inc's IPO valuation makes it worth more than iconic brands such as American Airlines, Twitter and Macy's, on its first day at school.
Yet the trouble is, it's not enough to simply plug and play your advertising and other experiences from the channels of years gone by into the plethora of modern options now available. Kodak famously spent millions attempting to replicate the film-based experience of their cameras using digital technology. That is, they focused too much on the how of their business and not enough on the why. And we all know how that turned out.
To put it another way, what worked in the era of the radio would have seemed hilariously outdated and one-dimensional on television. Likewise, the advertising, content and experiences created for TV just seem arduous on desktops, and downright clunky on mobile.
There’s been a fundamental shift in how we interact with and consume media and devices. Our response has been to completely transform our approach to not just mobile but screens as a whole, pivoting from passive planning to active planning, activating mobile and digitally-enabled experiences generally. We've taken the view that it's not about the device, but the wider context – the when, where and why.
Yet it's important to remember: mobile is not the end game and perhaps never was. It's becoming the remote control for our lives, increasingly acting almost as our body double and in a digital-everything world, our doppel.
If Pokemon Go seemed fleeting and frivolous, one glance at your home screen full of Uber, Spotify, Snapchat, Evernote, PayPal, Lemonade and whatever your other apps-du-jour should make our point clear; mobile has completely reshaped old industries, created new ones and otherwise fundamentally caused us to have to rethink the core market dynamics we thought we knew to be true. Incumbent organisations are leaving their flank open if they don’t know how to capitalise on the opportunities afforded by mobile – and that's a substantial opportunity for anyone willing to take it.
Last year, Mary Meeker claimed that 24% of all time spent consuming media is now on mobile. A fairly rudimentary analysis of advertising spend would suggest that it should shift allocation accordingly. However this thinking is outdated at best, implying that a copy + paste approach will be sufficient. As we said earlier, what worked before just won't cut it in the world of mobile. We need to develop new solutions to core objectives centred on the kind of interactions we want to foster between brands and their customers.
Spend on the channel holistically should absolutely be reallocated, and if anything scaled up and broadened to be a budget focused on outcome, not execution. This is echoed in the work of network agency Isobar who are reframing solutions around the complete mobile experience – think vertical content, chat-style brand conversations and single-thumb interactions.
Mobile is going to be critical to crack in order to win in this new economy - one anchored on individuals and highly personalised experiences. We haven't even begun to realise the full potential of this technology and environment, but we're well equipped to take it on with partners that have the same vision for the world ahead.
By Isobar executive strategy director Sam Sterling and Dentsu Aegis Network group head of product and partnerships Simon Williams.