How working from home has made mobile more powerful

Mobile specialist Matt Longley looks at how the lockdown has changed the way his business works with agency clients

As I write this I am sitting at a desk in my home. The desk is adjacent to another desk that my wife, inexplicably, found in the shed at the weekend. There are three laptops open; my wife is editing part of a national newspaper on one, I’m trying to write this article on another and a five-year-old is fidgeting in front of another, copying a diagram of a frog’s lifecycle.

It seems incredible that somehow, over the space of a month, this has become normal. I never thought it would be normal to hear the kids playing outside while I was on a Zoom call. I never thought it would be normal to Facetime someone, as standard, instead of just calling them.

And I certainly never thought it would be normal to be working from home for five Thursdays in a row rather than spending time on Charlotte Street with clients.

But here we are. Here we all are, trying to fit into a routine, trying to make the most of what we have and frankly, as an industry, trying to survive through an incredibly uncertain time. The outbreak of this coronavirus has changed the course of our future. We are yet to really find ‘normal’.

And perhaps the greatest lesson we might learn out of all of this is that there isn’t really a normal, that there is no set way to do things, that we can think outside the box and be truly creative in what we do, as individuals and as an industry.

I asked a few of our team what the biggest change had been for them over the past month.

I was surprised to receive only positive feedback.

We are now a team without borders. We have offices in London and Manchester, and our tech partner, Emodo, is based in San Francisco with various bases across the US. It is hard to admit, but remote working has forced us to unite as one single team for the first time. We do not delay conversations until a colleague is ‘down in London’. We do not wait for our weekly scheduled calls with our US offices. [advert position=”left”]

We get all parties involved, as often as they need to be. We have also discovered that, right under our noses all along, there has been a daily 15-hour window in which to work on campaigns.

If an important campaign is signed off at 5pm in the UK, our US colleagues can launch the campaign before midnight. It seems ludicrous that it has taken a situation as extreme as coronavirus for us to realise this.

Despite the physical distances involved, we are a closer team than we have ever been before. It seems inconceivable that we might go back to the old habit of using distance as a barrier to good, simple communication.

Afterall, isn’t that essentially what we as an industry are about?

Good, simple communication?

We have been more proactive, as a sales team, than ever. We will be the first to admit that it has taken a full month to find a balance of how to approach the market in the current situation. It has taken time to understand that what agencies and brands need is not necessarily offers of media value and great deals.

What we have realised is that we are sitting on a wealth of data that can help brands understand the world we are living in. We used to ask agencies for insights into brands. Now we offer agencies insights for their brands.

Mobile communication has never had a more important moment.

It is there for people when they need it, to offer news, advice and access to their friends and families. And we can help brands understand how people use their mobiles and how a brand’s audience might be shifting as the impact of the coronavirus takes full shape.

This is not taking advantage of a terrible situation; it is not profiteering. It is helping to prepare brands for the future and ensure that, when the time comes, they know how to re-enter the market as fully informed as possible.

At Mobsta we have always sold ourselves on the power of our data. But it has taken lockdown, and a truly brilliant insight team, to delve deep enough into it and explore the right avenues to understand the true potential of what we can offer.

Using anonymised device IDs, we use real-world location behaviour to build audiences, recognising groups with ‘active lifestyles’ or those who would be deemed as ‘business travellers’. We recently investigated how our audiences have engaged with recent campaigns. There has been a significant shift in what these groups are interested in. Our ‘active lifestyle’ audience has engaged more with home improvement ads and clicks to site are up over 300%.

So, if a brand is currently only talking to its traditional audience, we want to share these new data insights with them. We can show that brand that it is missing out on a potentially huge untapped segment that is, quite suddenly, engaged with home improvement.

Now is precisely the time that a brand could approach this audience and start to build a relationship with a new consumer that will last into the future? At Mobsta we think this is hugely exciting, and our job right now is to share these insights with brands and help them understand how to plan for the present based on real data.

A month into the lockdown, it has become clear that working from home has given us an opportunity – time to reflect on the ways we can help brands navigate an uncertain future. For now, however, we stay at home.

When the offices reopen, when I can share a beer with a colleague outside a pub on a Thursday afternoon, well, it will feel like a homecoming of sorts. I suppose you could even say I’ll be working from home.

Matt Longley is client director at mobile audience and location specialist Mobsta