Every year we share our predictions for the major trends and factors that will influence change in the mobile industry. Now that we’re nearly halfway through 2015, it’s time to take stock and see how many concepts have become reality.
Customisation is reaching the mass market
An overriding theme in mobile advertising this year has been relevancy and added value to consumers. Why should I engage with a brand sending me content related to their latest products? Time is a commodity for those of us who juggle work, family, social lives and so on. We are now more than ever bombarded by choice. As Dr Simon Hampton, resident psychologist at the IAB UK, puts it: “Choice is now becoming a waste of time.”
Content is wasted on an individual if it isn’t personally relevant. What this means has been understood for a long time, but this year we’re seeing excellent examples of how this is brought to life as tools like location make this happen.
Take the LAD Bible, a media brand committed to personal relevance among a mass audience that is predominantly mobile-first. The brand is growing by 250,000 followers a week and getting 3.5m likes, shares and comments on its media every day. The brand’s marketing director Mimi Turner attributes the success to “turning viral marketing into an art form”.
It’s about tapping into what each reader embraces in their lives and delivering it for personal mobile devices. Many followers come via Facebook, where content is shared within the person’s newsfeed, making it feel all the more relevant. As a media brand, the LAD Bible has been able to put effective content first and brand second. It’s a model that many brands we speak to are looking towards for inspiration.
At AdWeek Europe in March, we saw some excellent examples of custom or personally-tailored approaches to advertising. Coca-Cola, for example, exhibited predictive targeting based on mapping prior intent against customer profiles. Then there was Burberry’s highly personalised My Burberry perfume campaign, to which a 9% growth in year-on-year sales has been attributed.
During a retail panel at the Guardian Changing Media Summit, Lisa Bridgett, director of global sales and marketing at Net-a-Porter, eloquently described how brands are moving towards mass customisation. By building this rich picture of who we are as individuals through first and third-party data, advertisers are able to understand the context of our impulses and habits much better. What’s more, customer expectation is starting to demand this level of tailored service.
While it’s great to see data being used to greater effect, even more exciting is the heightened level of creativity displayed in these campaigns. Brands and agencies are going beyond the confines of job roles to collaborate and ultimately drive more inspiring and effective marketing creations.
Programmatic gets a personal makeover
For a while it seemed that automation and personalisation were juxtaposed within the industry, but this idea has been broken apart this year and programmatic is already having a positive impact on ad agency revenues. Major media agencies have developed the expertise, platforms and partnerships required to run significant spend through programmatic. What’s more, algorithms are getting smarter, so we’re now at the point where we can create accurate and precise profiles of targeted audiences.
Programmatic is giving agencies complete control and transparency over their media buys, giving them access and a voice over their own data and insights. Programmatic is now – as Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser has said – part of the fabric of the media agency. Fashion retailer Reiss, for example, is a brand seeing strong results through better use of data to target shoppers in the right place, at the right time and with relevant content. In fact, the brand has seen a 63% decrease in cost per acquisition (CPA) for new customers.
However, the next steps will be to refine this as more programmatic inventory options come to market. According to eMarketer, 69% of total programmatic display advertising spend will come from mobile by 2016. While mobile is often used to browse for products and services, most retail transactions are still happening in-store or offline.
This has limited overall out of home (OOH) advertising or in-store media spend due to the complexities of measuring the offline impact of mobile advertising until now. Mobile or location-aware inventory is a major opportunity for brands to take their media buying to the next level of relevance, targeting based on when an individual is in exactly the right context and frame of mind to make a purchase.
Path to purchase
Never has there been the diversity in device launches like we’ve seen this year. Phablet (smartphone/tablet hybrid) sales are surging and are expected to outstrip both smartphone and tablet sales by 2016. This trend is occurring in tandem with the availability of more wearable smart devices, such the Apple Watch. With a wider range of mobile devices in possession, the consumer path-to-purchase is fundamentally changing. Nearly 86 million consumers will make a purchase on their device in 2016 and advertisers are strongly adapting campaigns to take into account the opportunity mobile presents to target at each stage of the purchase journey. Through mobile, advertising can now take an individual from awareness though to action.
Sabrina Bailey-Navalon is EMEA marketing director at xAd
To find out more about the potential of location marketing, get in touch with the xAd team at contactus@xad.com
This advertisement feature is brought to you by xAd, sponsors of the Guardian Media Network’s Future of advertising hub.
