Hey Siri…what’s next for brands?
MEC’s Ben Rickard, head of mobile, EMEA, explains how the new iPhone and iOS 9 are set to disrupt the advertising industry.
Apple had the world’s sights set firmly on Cupertino yet again last week as it unveiled an array of mouth-watering gadgets and updates, tempting us to spend our hard-earned cash on its latest tech for our pockets, wrists and homes.
So, what does the new tech mean for marketers and brands? As one of the major tech players of today, Apple’s innovations will have influence over the channels available to our industry.
Following all the recent talk about ad blocking in iOS 9, Apple mentioned nothing new about this at the event. It makes you realise how Apple has the power to disrupt an entire industry with a topic that is nothing but a side show to Apple itself.
The WatchOS 2 will really allow Apple Watch to develop and push forward into new territories. The health demos shown at the event were impressive, and any brand with a utility offer must now consider the watch, glances and notifications as part of the communications toolset.
The new Siri proactive assistant further suggests that notifications and alerts will be a major driving force for future mobile services – even more than apps themselves. Brands that notify their customers of relevant and contextual information, will really win in this space.
Bigger, clearer screens on the new iPads and iPhones continue to highlight the need for beautiful apps and mobile experiences. Very high resolution images are now the new normal, and the use of low resolution images or pixilated ads will be damaging to how consumers view a brand.
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The new creative features like 4K video and Live Photos further show how quality content can be created and edited directly from the iPhone. Live Photos look like high quality beautiful GIFs and it will be interesting to see how brands will work with this new creative form across mobile and social.
Facebook has announced that it will enable the new format soon, but we expect this to be restricted to mobile devices as it requires a force push to enable. The rise of social-mobile continues…
The iPhone upgrade programme is great for consumers but bad news for mobile operators who will need to find a new way to differentiate their commoditised airtime plans. These plans will suddenly become more transparent, comparable and remove the need for a long term contract.
With its new TV offering, Apple is making another play for the living room and becoming a threat to the traditional games consoles. With mobile games on an incredible rise and with declining console unit sales, it’s not hard to envisage a world where games reside within the same consumer ecosystem as everything else, e.g. Apple and Google.
In fact, Apple is already allowing developers to extend their mobile games to TV and enable the stop-start action between TV, iPhone and iPad.
Retail brands will now be able to take their apps to a large screen, enabling a full lean back sofa experience. The demos at the event showed the advantage of curating retail experiences in apps, and Apple clearly believes that this provides the very best experience whatever the screen.
This is further evidence that the screen is simply becoming ‘dumb glass’ and it’s the consistent cloud services and apps that run on the glass that is the real differentiator.
As we dive into this multi-screen world, the need to understand and connect identity becomes more important than ever to marketers. With a new ‘device ID’ or ‘user’ on the TV, we are getting closer to the concept of programmatic advertising across digital screens, buying channel agnostic audiences as and when they appear on each screen.
The holy grail in this new world would see the mobile device become the ‘data listener’ – picking up relevant personal information about each consumer and then delivering a full screen personalised TV ad to the user based on that information. Now wouldn’t that be nice.