Mobile advertising: understand your customer
Smartphone penetration is at an all-time high, offering brands a new gateway into the heart of the consumer. However a large proportion of mobile advertising is underwhelming and mobile strategies really need kicking into shape, or brands risk losing consumers for good. So what should a good mobile strategy entail? Claire Spencer, head of insight at UM London, investigates.
According to recent IAB figures, advertisers are now investing over £526 million a year on mobile advertising – putting it in the same league as radio spend. It’s a phenomenal growth. To put it into context, in 2008 the total UK ad spend was just £29 million.
Despite these impressive numbers, and rather worryingly, a large proportion of mobile advertising is underwhelming. Many advertisers are guilty of lazily rehashing a standard digital banner creative that was originally designed for a much larger screen. And even if they do get it right, the mobile site that they send customers to is often just not up to standard.
It’s a real missed opportunity – and one that could cost businesses a serious amount of money. Yet there’s just one thing that advertisers need to do to make it work: return to the customer.
Brands need to understand exactly how mobile phones feature in their customers’ worlds and what kind of activities they are using them for throughout the day. That way, they can develop bespoke mobile solutions that tap into customer habits and enhance people’s mobile experiences, rather than disrupt them.
Research from UM’s latest Little Book of Curiosity series – Stretching Spectrums – helps advertisers to understand how mobile is featuring in their customers’ lives, and provides insight into how they can use this information to plan more relevant and timely mobile communication solutions.
The report highlights that today’s consumers are connected 24/7 via their mobiles, using them for activities as diverse as finding a job through to following a recipe. The opportunity this provides for brands is huge.
Over a third of smartphone owners, for example, access the internet while shopping. Imagine the commercial opportunities this opens up for businesses, who could potentially reach customers right at the point of sale to influence their purchase decision.
UM has, in fact, already capitalised on this trend with a mobile campaign developed for milkshake brand FRijj, in which an advert for a FRijj app was activated on people’s mobile phones as soon as they entered the vicinity of a supermarket that stocked the product. The campaign had 3,796 app downloads and generated 19.6 million impressions, raising customers’ awareness of the new FRijj range to 42%.
We also discovered through our research that a fifth of smartphone owners are searching for local information on a weekly basis, whilst 43% are checking the weather – again, behaviour that brands could tap into.
Luxury jeweller Tiffany recently did so in New York by sponsoring geo-targeted adverts in the Weather Channel app, to alert people to the location of their new Soho store. Upon opening the app’s map feature, users could see a banner ad on the top of the page and a link to the new store address. The adverts were clickable and allowed people to instantly call the store or get directions from wherever they were located.
It’s not just commercial companies that are benefiting from the rise of mobile media, either. Grapple Mobile and UM London launched the first dedicated charity app for Marie Curie, which had a huge impact on fundraising during the charity’s flagship Great Daffodil Appeal.
The ‘Virtual Collector Tin’ app enabled fundraisers to send a quick text message to their contacts, inviting them to donate to Marie Curie. People could then choose to donate either £2 or £5 in reply to the text message, and were then charged via their mobile phone bill.
An important insight from Stretching Spectrums is that not everyone is comfortable using their mobile as a wallet, but this Marie Curie mechanism provided a simple and safe way for large numbers to donate.
The examples above highlight how brands are starting to take advantage of mobile in ground-breaking ways, but over the coming months and years I think we will start to see a lot more innovation as brands explore this ever-developing space.
The recent launch of Weve – a joint venture between EE, O2 and Vodafone – represents a true shift in the market. By working together, these operators can now offer a truly scalable and multi-dimensional mobile advertising solution. When combined, the information Weve has about its customer base will allow for some of the most powerful and sophisticated targeting opportunities that marketers have ever known.
Ultimately though, we must not forget the personal relationships that people have with their mobiles, and the level of quality and interaction that they demand from mobile advertising experiences (a demand that will only increase following the conclusion of Ofcom’s 4G auction). It’s all extremely exciting.
My advice for brands would be to get trialing mobile advertising solutions as soon as possible and start laying the foundations of a robust mobile strategy. But do everything with the customer in mind.
You can download a copy of the full Little Book of Curiosity – Stretching Spectrums report here.