FMCG & Media: What are we waiting for?
Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, says the danger of talking about the future is that people decide to wait. Mobile is the biggest opportunity for marketing since the launch of commercial TV and we don’t need to wait to make it work for brands…
There was a time when people didn’t believe digital would ever be that important. Back in the mid 90s less than 10% of the population were online and when trying to convince brands to build million dollar websites, we had to talk about the future. About our belief that one day millions of people would go online, that they would buy things, watch videos and connect with other people.
The great thing about mobile is that we don’t have to talk about the future. We don’t have to wait. It’s already here.
At this weeks excellent MediaTel Group FMCG & Media event (with O2) we heard that almost 10 million people in the UK have an iPhone. And around 20 million have an Android smartphone. Whatever you are selling, that’s enough. Already.
Yet we keep talking about the future. Project Oscar – where operators will collaborate (subject to Brussels approval) on a mobile wallet with built in loyalty scheme – is poised to take mobile payments mass market in the near future. Mobile wallets are an idea whose time has come – but apparently we need to wait for NFC.
Very few phones have this technology and even fewer shops have the readers. No-one seems clear on who is going to pay your local corner shop or supermarket to upgrade to NFC readers.
And NFC is touted as the future for advertising – when people can tap their phones against a poster to download content. How many posters have NFC and how can I tell which ones they are? I’ve even seen Google demo NFC as a way to interact with magazine ads, ignoring the fact adding the necessary chips to the page would cost around $50 per thousand.
Back in the day there was no alternative but to wait for the future but with mobile we don’t have to wait for anything. We could stop developing any new technology and, just using what’s in millions of peoples pockets today, do everything we want.
Paypal have a mobile payments system that enables mobile payments without NFC and so does Starbucks. The biggest bank in Kenya uses SMS for transferring money. Vodafone let you pay for cabs with a text and I pay for my Vespa parking by text.
People can – and do – use their smartphones to interact with ads today, using barcodes, QR codes and visual recognition like Google Goggles. Not many of those interactions are compelling but that’s not about the technology. It’s about how it is used and, given millions of phones already have these technologies built in, smart brands will get smarter at using them.
The danger of talking about the future is that people decide to wait. Mobile is the biggest opportunity for marketing since the launch of commercial TV and we don’t need to wait to make it work for brands.
Start investing now and start learning – and when/if NFC does arrive you’ll be well positioned to take advantage. And if some new technology does supersede it, you’ll still be well positioned.
It’s time to experiment.