Mobile Fix: Digital transformation
In his round-up of everything mobile, Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive!, this week looks at embracing digital, the latest mobile adspend forecasts and new developments in the mobile money space.
We delivered a big Digital Transformation workshop this week and developing the content and the exercises reminded us how many businesses are struggling to understand how to best embrace digital. At the C level it’s usually the CMO that has the best handle on digital – but digital is so much bigger than marketing.
As this Adweek chart shows, CMOs expect digital to grow to 75% of their budget – but 42% worry about managing that change.
When we talk with a wider C level audience we tend to find a hunger for knowledge across two areas:
– What is the topline on digital marketing? – so they can judge whether the marketing team are moving fast enough
– What can we learn from other businesses that will help us evolve into a business that uses digital throughout the enterprise?
The Accenture study of CMOs that the Adweek chart is based on suggests just 21% believe their company will be known as a digital business in five years’ time. So we need the whole C suite on board if progress is to be made.
So a new McKinsey report on the digital tipping point is well timed. Their research shows that executives believe their CEOs are increasingly involved in digital initiatives. But they believe the most important digital focus will shift from digital engagement of customers to the digital innovation of products, operating models or business models in the next three years.
Another McKinsey piece highlights the breadth of issues with a look at digitising the customer journey – and the opportunity to design a better experience and reduce the ‘leakage’ across channels. But even within this, a key question is who owns the customer and how you can get a silo based organisation to collaborate in the way needed to make radical change.
Our work in the area of Digital Transformation ranges from Workshops and change management programmes through to briefing CEOs and Boards on how companies have embraced digital with different degrees of success. There is lots of interesting learning and a clear opportunity for those who take the initiative, rather than waiting to be disrupted by someone more nimble. If you would like to learn more about our work in this area let me know.
UK Mobile Adspend to hit £2 billion
To reinforce the pace of change eMarketer has predicted that mobile advertising will be bigger than print next year and bigger than TV in 2016. There is a slim chance it could be bigger than print this year as the forecast shows them neck and neck.
Does looking at spend this way actually help though? Should brands be measuring the % of spend on mobile or is the smart approach to spread the money across the channels where your audiences are? If you want to reach the people who value the Guardian then you will spend across print, online and mobile – tailoring the message to suit the channel it will be delivered in.
AKQAs’ Tom Bedecarre made a great presentation which gets into how the opportunity is so much bigger now and that the incremental approach just wont get you very far.
As we have said before, there is a danger we are building an industry on sand. A high proportion of mobile adspend is VC money chasing app downloads from the rare people who pay to jump a level on Candy Crush. New research from Venture Beat shows that much of the app download spend isn’t actually that efficient. Couldn’t better creative have an effect here?
But talking with another publisher this week we learned they do the creative for free to incentivise the media buy. Until we get creative talent engaged with mobile, there is danger a large proportion of the mobile spend is being wasted.
Mobile Money
Talking with a bank about mobile and money this week was interesting. There is a real recognition that there is an opportunity with mobile to re-imagine money – but there doesn’t seem to be the appetite to try things. In the meantime start-ups are experimenting and an interesting new mobile-focused start-up, with a prepaid debit card service aimed at kids, has launched in the UK.
Inevitably it ends up looking at Bitcoin and this article by Peter Diamandis – the man behind the $10 million XPrize programme to encourage private spaceflight – is a good summary of the current state of Bitcoin and predicts we are just a couple of years from it really disrupting.
More on Google I/O
Following the Google I/O event there has been some smart thinking on the implications. This interview with Larry Page and Sundar Pichai adds some colour to the various announcements. This quote jumps out:
“Today, computing mainly automates things for you. But there’s an evolution from, today we tell computers to do stuff for us, to where computers can actually do stuff for us. For example, if I go and pick up my kids, it would be good for my car to be aware that my kids have entered the car and change the music to something that’s appropriate for them.”
This is an edited and abridged version of Mobile Fix – click here to read the full article on Addictive!’s website
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