Mobile Fix: Educate, Agitate, Organise

Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, discusses how we can make the most of mobile…

Educate, Agitate & Organise – what we need to do to fulfill the promise of the mobile opportunity.

Education

With plenty of hard evidence around showing the size and potential of mobile, getting brands (and their agencies) educated remains vital.

Google stepped up this week with their excellent ThinkMobile session in London. With a large audience of brand and agency people, Google provided lots of education.

Keynotes from the smartest man in advertising, Rory Sutherland, and from Carphone Warehouse founder Charles Dunstone, gave the big picture. Then Google tech superstar Amanda Rosenburg demoed some of the many mobile ad formats using the cool Media Kit Android app – the Brazilian version of which was developed by our Dev partners PontoMobi. She also showed off the magical Google Goggles and Translate – which seemed to be new to many in the audience.

Ian Carrington then shared lots of UK data from the new Google and MMA research – pointing out that over a third of all UK consumers now have a smartphone, and significant numbers are already using their mobile to shop, bank and browse the internet.

We then had five great case studies from brands who have invested in mobile. Unilever, Waitrose and Audi all talked of good results whilst ebookers and Paddy Power shared data showing the dramatic effect mobile was having on their business.

So there is plenty of education going on. Do we need to agitate more?

Agitation

The definition of agitate is to make someone troubled or nervous – so we need to be sharing the evidence of disruption. The team here at addictive always talk about the disruptive effect of mobile – just like online in the 90s, mobile is shaking up markets and creating winners and losers…

In the week we saw the High Street change forever, with famous brands shuttering their stores, mobile is disrupting retail.

We see that over 45% of UK smartphone users have used their mobiles to help with shopping. New US Forrester research talks of an imminent spike in mobile shopping with a forecast to reach $31 billion by 2016. The report seems cautious to us – the Booz Allen data we’ve been sharing shows that mobile will influence $110 billion of retail sales this year in Europe.

Econsultancy have done some smart thinking on how retailers can work with this new behaviour – reflecting the conversations we have been having with retailers over recent months.

We also need to agitate the Financial Services sector. As Lloyds announce thousands of job losses we see the mobile network operators collaborating to offer a mobile wallet service. And Google Wallet will be here soon

US mobile money start up Square has raised more money at a valuation of $1 billion. Started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Square is now handling $4 million each day – up from $1 million just a couple of months ago.

With Tesco re-entering the banking market and Virgin poised to buy Northern Rock, we foresee lots of disruption. And given both those brands own mobile businesses we expect mobile to be a big part of this disruption.

And advertising is getting disrupted too – but this business is always pretty agitated.

The news that Heineken has gone direct to Google and agreed a partnership over the heads of their pretty smart agencies suggests things are changing. We find clients don’t believe their agencies get mobile – yet. Does mobile increase the chance of agencies being disintermediated? Most of them have been pretty slow to get up to speed on digital – will clients wait for them to catch up on mobile?

Organisation

The steps a brand needs to take to be effectively organised for mobile need streamlining. We need to make mobile easier – it’s changing so fast and it can be complicated. At addictive we try and keep it simple, avoiding tech talk, and focus on the problems that mobile can solve – for brands and for people – rather than the technology.

Google have a new product that will help with organisation. Google Sites lets anyone quickly put together a mobile friendly site – so hopefully the two thirds of brands that don’t yet have a mobile friendly site will use this for a quick fix. With analytics built in the resulting data should enable real money to be invested in building world class destination.

Another element of organisation is how budget gets allocated. Here at addictive we always quote a McKinsey paper called ‘Boosting Returns on Marketing Investment’. This is a good review of the rigour used in allocating marketing spend and recommends that brands spend 80% of their budget on bankers – strategies and tactics you know will work – and 20% on learning through well structured tests. It’s worth thinking through how much of the money you’re spending is helping you learn about a new opportunity.

Building a business case for mobile is no longer that hard – the data is around and every element can be measured. We just need to organise ourselves to put mobile first.

Devices

Rumours of the new iPhone are getting louder – looks like September could see two new iPhones – the iPhone 5 plus a budget priced device based on the iPhone 4

And there is also a little more noise around Amazon and their hardware ambitions. Having made a success of the Kindle, we’re convinced they will launch a tablet – they can’t risk having Apple and Google outmanouvre them in digital content by conceding distribution.

People

Foursquare hit 10 million users.

All Things D has provided a great summary of what’s happening with Facebook and mobile. We’re working on a couple of Facebook apps and are focusing on HTML5 rather than flash, to future proof them for when Facebook enables more functionality on mobile. Facebook are also starting to better police apps, closing down those that spit out updates too frequently.

We hear MySpace is being sold for just $35m . Of course News Group never lost money on the deal – they agreed a $900m ad deal with Google shortly after the purchase which guaranteed them a significant profit.

In a sort of Hollywood coincidence Justin Timberlake, who played Facebook founder Sean Parker in the Social Network, has invested in MySpace too.

We’re reminded that in a previous existence (Big Picture) we were experts in how people used MySpace and the importance of Top Friends etc. Back in 2006, though, few brands cared about social, or mobile.

The other social news is that Google + is out – albeit in beta – and getting some good feedback. It’s a little premature to comment – you need to spend time with social tools to see how they work before pontificating – but some reviews are worth reading.

Physical

Excellent use of QR codes for Tesco in Korea won the Media award at Cannes last week.

And another Google initiative is an e-book looking at how brands can exploit the Zero Moment of Truth – good old sales promotion or shopper marketing thinking, with mobile at the heart.

Finally

Our good friends and Development partners Pontomobi have a cool new showreel

Plus, there’s an interesting conference, Senior Market Mobile 2011, which will look at how the Silver Surfer and senior market are using mobile. Use the code MobileFix to get a discounted ticket.

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