Mobile Fix: Wearables or peripherals?
In his latest Mobile Fix, Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive! takes a look at the rise (and fall) of wearable tech.
After a year or so our Nike Fuelband is being retired. Why? The key thing is that – without the sync with one’s phone – it doesn’t do that much. And given they still don’t have an Android app, we have given up.
But we get all that the Fuelband did and more from Moves. This app uses the smartphone GPS to work out how far you have walked, run or cycled – and the iPhone version lets you measure much more. And the data can be shared with 30 complementary apps.
And the Nike+ app on an iPhone 5 is arguably better than a Fuelband.
All this supports our thinking that wearables would be better termed peripherals – unless you have a smartphone in close proximity the functionality tends to be limited. And there isn’t a problem with this – using a watch or band as a sensor makes sense. And for glancing at a text or email the small screen makes sense too.
Once this small peripheral becomes common, we suspect that the smartphone could get bigger so the screens are suited for different use cases. Could the mini tablets become the norm – with watches and Glass used for calls etc? Or is the phablet the form factor of the future?
The biggest advocate for Glass has voiced his concerns – suggesting Glass won’t be a success in the short term. Scoble remains bullish in the longer term though.
It’s worth remembering how other ‘tech’ has gone from freakish to fashionable. Back in the 1930s dark glasses were a new fad, but sunglasses are now everywhere. And until 1980 the idea of walking the streets listening to music on headphones seemed alien.
But equally some tech can give off the wrong signal – the stigma of bluetooth headsets is best demonstrated by Ken from an early episode of Breaking Bad.
This is a good round up of predictions about wearables but for the key challenge is a marketing one. And we would put our money on Apple – if they can position their watch with the same genius as their white headphones they have a chance.
Tracking
The old John Wanamaker* quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” has never been more relevant.
With the avalanche of data from digital media it should be getting easier to see what works and what doesn’t. Talk with any C level Client and they tend to be frustrated that such a major piece of expenditure still lacks the rigour of other major investments.
We were hugely influenced by a McKinsey paper from 2005 called Boosting Returns on Marketing Investment and it’s sort of depressing that so much of that thinking still feels novel for so many businesses.
But research on the desktop web is getting better. A new partnership between comScore and Google’s Doubleclick means that advertisers can now be more certain the ads they are buying are actually being seen – and by the right audience. And the metrics so familiar from TV – like reach and frequency – are now possible on digital.
A significant improvement is the ability to integrate brand lift surveys with campaigns, so core brand metrics like awareness and favourability can be measured in close to real time, enabling ongoing tweaking of the campaign to improve performance. We have advocated that digital creative should be pre tested with a limited media buy before the full spend kicks in and these tools would help in that prototyping.
This research is available in the US later this year with eventual plans to expand the service for mobile and cross-platform.
These eventual plans highlight a problem; some of the things that gave digital a degree of accountability don’t work that well on mobile; Cookies are now just as endangered as Flash intros.
These tiny bits of data (stored in the users web browser allow marketers to track clicks, return visits, basket content and to store passwords) have been controversial but hugely useful. Yet just as EU regulations mean that every visit to a website requires navigating past a cookie policy popup, the industry is searching for an alternative.
Why? Because most people now use multiple devices to access the web – and cookies can’t effectively track across devices unless someone is signed in (Hello Google, Facebook & Amazon). And for the majority of mobile web cookies don’t work because Apple doesn’t support them.
One salvation in mobile was the UDID (Universal Device ID) – but Apple stopped apps from accessing that last year. The IDFA (Identifier for Advertising) introduced by Apple was more usable and didn’t have the same security worries. Now the usefulness of that is reduced as Apple no longer allow apps to use this info unless they sell advertising. Which means that these apps can’t track where a download came from.
This may sounds a little niche but Facebook use the IDFA to demonstrate the effectiveness of their app download advertising, so a huge proportion of mobile revenue just lost it’s key KPI.
Even within the current tracking frameworks there are issues – Facebook has just dropped two mobile ad partners as they were holding onto user data for too long. Balancing user privacy with advertising tracking remains a tricky issue.
There are lots of people conjuring up new and novel ways to track mobile advertising but until we have a better understanding of what is working, this instability could jeopardize the rising investment in mobile.
The sooner Google and comScore can find a way to bring their new tools to mobile the better.
*Actually half the time this is quoted, it’s misattributed. We just don’t know which half is right.
Chromecast – the future of TV
It looks like an official UK release of Chromecast is imminent. Oddly it has been withdrawn from Amazon in the UK and you can no longer have it shipped from Amazon.com. It’s also disappeared from the UK Google Play store.
Hopefully the recent release of the SDK means that someone is working on making iPlayer, LOVEFiLM, Blinkbox, and so on, work with Chromecast. In the meantime it is proving great for YouTube and Netflix. With almost 12,000 reviews on Amazon, Chromecast is a game-changer and if Google put some marketing muscle behind it we expect it have a big effect.
As small screen video makes it on to the big screen, it’s clear that quality is of paramount importance. A good example of newTV content that is good enough for the big screen are the wonderful films from Chipotle. This is branded content at its best – highly entertaining and a strong brand message.
This case study on how Jamie Oliver uses YouTube is also worth a look.
This is an edited and abridged version of Mobile Fix – click here to read the full article on Addictive!’s website