That is according to one exec running mobile strategy within a media agency.
“There’s so much mobile consumption, the inventory is potentially infinite in supply,” MEC Interaction mobile head Jide Sobo tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We need to be careful not to overburden consumers with too much advertising.
“It’s great for publishers and Facebook to increase their yield by putting more adverts in there – but you need to be careful about the experience.”
Sobo is a long-time mobile marketer who focuses on spotting and integrating new technologies for MEC.
Whilst he calls the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat “siloed” “wall gardens”, they are crucial partners, he says.
“We’re seeing great traction but it’s an individual, siloed play, rather than being able to talk to people in their entirety across the mobile web,” Sobo tells us. “We need to keep an open perspective to be able to reach people all of the time.
“The problem is, on the mobile web, there is less data available. It’s a pay-off between data and larger reach.
“It’s super-important to create and develop different adverts for each platform. Between Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you need to have different creative.”
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>At Mobile World Congress, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told Beet.TV mobile technology still wasn’t attractive enough to make it a truly engaging ad medium, while P&G marketing VP Sophie Blum said the small screen was a challenge.
Now another global chief marketer is raising the issues around mobile advertising.
“We’ve taken a lot of advertising logic in to what is ostensibly a one-to-one marketing medium – (but) advertising is a one-to-many experience,” according to Bank Of America enterprise media planning, investment and measurement SVP Lou Paskalis.
But Paskalis may have an answer for the industry. Speaking at the congress, he gave Beet.TV a menu of three considerations mobile marketers need to address:
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>When IPG’s mobile and technology agency Ansible worked with survey group YouGov to produce an index ranking brands’ effectiveness at mobile presentation, some of the figures shocked global CEO Travis Johnson.
The index examined 2,000 brands in 15 countries against 60 criteria, generating some 240,000 data points.
“The entire score was out of 130 – there are some brands in the US and around the world that were getting 10s and 20s,” Johnson tells Beet.TV in this video interview during Mobile World Congress.
“Indeed, the highest telco scored about 120 out of 130; the lowest one scored about 20. This is their business – to be good at mobile – and they don’t even have their apps and actual mobile presence sorted. There’s lots of room for improvement across every category.”
Ansible was formed in 2007, acquired the UK’s Mubaloo last year and recently rolled out in India. It is the division that makes mobile experiences for IPG brands.
At Mobile World Congress, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told Beet.TV mobile technology still wasn’t attractive enough to make it a truly engaging ad medium, while P&G marketing VP Sophie Blum said the small screen was a challenge.
Furthermore, Bank Of America enterprise media planning, investment and measurement SVP Lou Paskalis told us marketers should stop jamming one-to-many advertising in to what is actually a one-to-one channel experience.
It is, by now, well known that, whilst consumers spend a large amount of their overall time with their smartphones, advertisers’ spend does not meet the same proportion.
On the desktop, advertisers have faced the necessity to clean up their presentation and not to over-burden consumers. And Ansible’s Johnson says they need to do the same on mobile, to ensure a discoverable, usable site.
“Google says, if a page doesn’t load in three seconds, people will reject it and go back to a competitors’ site,” he says. “The average of all the brands we surveyed was 10 seconds.
“Over half the world’s traffic is now in mobile – but we’ve still got brands that are just not embracing it.”
So he says it is now time to stop optimising the mere targeting of advertising, which has already been effectively tackled, and to focus on the delivery environment instead.
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview at Mobile World Congress, Adam Shlachter, president at Publicis’ PMX division, says mobile is no longer a single thing.
“Mobile has disappeared at this conference,” he says. “It’s not as handset-forward, carrier-forward or network-forward. It’s more much about connectivity, personalisation, the way we live our lives, operate our businesses and how we connect.”
Shlachter will be keynote speaker at the Beet.TV executive retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico, next week.
Mobile World Congress is no longer just the world’s largest mobile expo and conference. It has grown rapidly in recent years to become one of a clutch of four or five global mega-conferences attracting execs and hangers-on from all kinds of industries.
Beside distinctly non-phone hardware on show, MWC’s main headlines were Nokia’s reintroduction of its classic 3310 handset (a move suggesting mobile launches themselves have run out of steam) and new smartphones that have less bezel and more screen.
But TechCrunch writes MWC is now about “general connectivity as well as the devices and services which will connect our world in the future”. And, just as brands and ad agencies flock to the Consumer Electronics Show these days, so, too, is Mobile World Congress now a big draw for ad-land.
Shlachter, who recently moved to PMX after a stint as president at sibling Zenith’s VM1, says advertisers must respond to a world in which mobile phones now jostle with voice assistants and connected fridges as just parts of an overall connected experience.
“The next big leap for brands is to figure out how to live in that world – how to take advantage of all the signal, how to create more personalised experiences that are unique for different platforms they’re being consumed on,” he says.
“We have to stop thinking about it as a silo or independent channel, we have to think about how it can have access everything else.
“Navigating this world is becoming increasingly complex. Brands have to figure out the role they want to play with the relationship they have with their consumers in these environments.”
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>“It’s a completely different way of thinking about marketing,” Randall Rothenberg says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Mobile World Congress 2017. “All marketers are kind of overwhelmed.”
With some two-thirds of U.S. consumers’ time spent on mobile devices, the biggest overall opportunity is “truly a one-to-one connection,” Rothenberg explains.
He offers an anecdotal observation about the extent of change in the mobile marketing world by noting that one of the MWC participants, Leonid Sudakov, used to be Chief Marketing Officer for the Mars pet care brands. “Now he’s President of Connected Solutions. That transition alone speaks volumes,” Rothenberg says.
In addition to figuring out the one-to-one consumer interface, brands and publishers are grappling with the question of how to integrate mobile media with preexisting media, according to Rothenberg. For example, how do Nielsen ratings for traditional television viewing mix with one-to-one metrics in the mobile environment?
On the publishing side, the classic advertising model continues to move to “some kind of post-advertising model.” Gone are the days of strictly thinking of advertising units as consisting of “boxes and time slots.”
For one thing, you just can’t fit enough of the boxes and time slots into the mobile space to make up for the volume of revenue that publishers enjoyed in the pre-mobile world. “The actual value that’s being created is through this one-to-one connection with the end user,” Rothenberg says.
Citing Turner Sports, CNN and Cartoon Network, Rothenberg notes that people will always want sports, news and entertainment content. These are “the kinds of things that publishing companies have specialized in since before the dawn of print,” he adds.
While the mobile train clearly has left the station, its potential has yet to be fully unleashed.
“You know you that you’ve got to start changing the wheels on the train but how you do it, what the new wheels are, what the time frame is to put the new wheels on is difficult to discern,” says Rothenberg.
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>That is according to a marketing chief from one of the biggest brand groups in the world.
“Mobile is not a device anymore – it’s a lifestyle shift,” says P&G EMEA marketing VP Sophie Blum, in this video interview with Beet.TV at Mobile World Congress. “That’s what is exciting.
“Of course, it’s challenging – it’s a small screen, 12 seconds is a luxury. It requires mastery of technology together with the art of understanding.
“What is exciting is the opportunity for brand masters and tech to collaborate in order to create better answers to consumer needs, wherever they want at their own terms.”
Mobile World Congress is no longer just the world’s largest mobile expo and conference. It has grown rapidly in recent years to become one of a clutch of four or five global mega-conferences attracting execs and hangers-on from all kinds of industries.
Beside distinctly non-phone hardware on show, MWC’s main headlines were Nokia’s reintroduction of its classic 3310 handset (a move suggesting mobile launches themselves have run out of steam) and new smartphones that have less bezel and more screen.
TechCrunch writes MWC is now about “general connectivity as well as the devices and services which will connect our world in the future”. And, just as brands and ad agencies flock to the Consumer Electronics Show these days, so, too, is Mobile World Congress now a big draw for ad-land.
Those bigger screens may give brands more real estate through which to reach consumers. But, speaking with Beet.TV at Mobile World Congress, Sir Martin Sorrell – CEO of the world’s largest ad agency holding group, WPP – says mobile ad spend lags behind consumers’ on-device time because the technology is not yet attractive enough for the buy side.
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>“That was the first thing we have ever done where we started with the mobile concept and then a lot of the ideas from that app then branched itself out into the linear space and branded content and other areas,” Donna Speciale explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s not a one-size-fits all, because every client is going to be using mobile and it’s created very differently,” Turner’s President of Ad Sales explains during a break at the Mobile World Congress 2017.
The data-centric CNN Politics app was designed by CA Technologies to track the latest polling, delegate, voting and fundraising data behind the 2016 presidential race. With personalized alerts and notifications, the app provided users with comprehensive election results, breaking news, enterprise and video reporting.
CA Technologies was a technology sponsor of the 2016 America’s Choice Election on CNN. On digital, CA was the exclusive sponsor of the CNN Politics app, as well as the hub on CNNPolitics.com that housed the app’s content and included CA branding.
Asked about Turner’s view of the upcoming TV Upfront negotiating season, Speciale talks about the shift from Nielsen age-sex demographics to audience targeting specific to clients’ needs and objectives.
“We are now able to hone in a lot more on who our fan is,” Speciale says of Turner’s audience targeting capabilities. “We’re now getting a lot more into who our fan base is and the behaviors of our fans and how we can marry that to our brands and their objectives coming together in the right environment.”
Speciale attends MWC for a glimpse of the future, given that the U.S. isn’t always ahead of trend curves like, say, China or Europe. It boils down to figuring out “How do I have to alter the organization or our thinking with clients, knowing in the next two or three years the next iteration of innovation is what? I think you can find that here,” she says.
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>So what’s the difference? While millennials were digital natives, Plurals are mobile natives with an expectation of seamless content consumption across devices and platforms. “Kids want what they want,” Miller says in this interview with Beet.TV at Mobile World Congress 2017. “It’s not about changing habits. They’re born into it.”
Plurals “have the capacity for choice and control in a way that maybe millennials didn’t,” Miller adds. “Multiplatform by design is really what we’re doing. We’re doing it in our marketing and we’re doing it in our content creation.”
While millennials were more prone to expecting lists of digital offerings (top 10 this or that) the next generation wants to mix and match on its own, according to Miller. Desire and control are key, as ADWEEK reports.
“If you give them your content and you let them experience your brand and participate they will evangelize for you. They are your greatest asset I building fans,” says Miller.
Plurals are highly visually oriented, to the point of live streaming their activities whereas millennials were better known for rapid-fire texting.
Asked for examples of successful multiplatform development catering to the visual generation, Miller cites the “reimagined version” of the globally successful Ben 10, which was launched with a Hero Time app at the end of 2016. Then there is Mighty Magiswords, which started life as 15-second content on CN Anything and has blossomed into a linear TV and gaming offering linked by an app called MagiMobile.
“You hold it up and it collects it off the TV every time there’s a sword that pops up,” Miller explains. “You’re able to move around and tie that vertical together. It gives a very deep robust immersive fan experience.”
Miller’s team keeps tabs daily on activity on Cartoon’s VOD platform, video mobile app and on-air programming, which provide a “plus plus plus multiplier. We see extremely high engagement across those platforms.”
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>The soft drink brand creates and publishes about extreme sports activities around the world to amplify its tagline, “Red Bull gives you wings”, the most notorious of which was a skydive from space.
So what is the secret recipe for content marketing success? Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview, Red Bull Media House chief technology officer Andreas Gall explains – it’s about social, not analogue.
“It’s like a formula,” he says. “Keep the people in your network, make them happy, produce the right content, and go step-by-step with these learnings in to the next successful area.
“When you’re distributing your content through social media platforms, you get perfect feedback.”
Last month, Red Bull Media House unveiled a raft of extreme sports experiences available via virtual reality.
Gall says Red Bull is hot on performance media.
“We try to avoid broadcast – it’s much more complex,” he says. “In the digital world, you have direct response. These numbers are so relevant for us.
“You see how many views, you see people switching from one category of your channel to another channel. You are learning every second.”
This video was produced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>That is according to the boss of the world’s largest ad agency holding group, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell.
Speaking with Beet.TV in this video interview at Mobile World Congress, Sorrell says the famous mobile ad spending gap is still far from being closed.
“People are spending about a quarter of their time on mobile, and yet it only accounts for around 12% of spending,” he says. “That’s out of kilter and it has to change.”
So, why is spending still lagging behind usage? Sorrell blames the tech.
“Technology, bandwidth, the devices, the screens are not big enough, not good enough yet,” he says. “There’s a lot of technological development to come.”
Magna Global estimates global mobile ad spend grew by 48% in 2016 to hit $80 billion in 2016, representing 45% of total digital ad spend and 16% of total ad spend.But the group expects strong growth, rising to 72% of digital and 36% of the total by 2021.
That is the fastest growth of any ad medium, surely enough to delight Mobile World Congress veterans who long remember predictions of the arrival of “the year of advertising”.
Yet Magna Global also says a key growth drivers has simply been dollars moving from desktop, a channel now plagued by ad blocking on top of deteriorating effectiveness.
Sorrell is looking to technological evolution to make mobile advertising a more attractive proposition in its own right.
“5G will obviously be important,” he adds. “In India, we’ve seen the explosion of 5G, with Mukesh Ambani launching 5G having invested $16bn without receiving a dollar of revenue. Facebook and Google tell me (about) the utilisation rates, the graph looks (vertical) – they’ve never seen any country in the world with such penetration so quickly.”
This video was produced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>“There has never been a time with more challenges, but there’s never been a more intellectually interesting time to be in the business,” Martin says in a reference to the explosion of both content and consumer choices for consuming it.
Turner has set an ambition for itself to “literally reinvent the company from the inside out.” While it intends to dominate its core businesses with premium content, Turner also knows it must keep abreast of shifting distribution venues, according to Martin.
“With these new distribution mechanisms and with so much choice available for consumers, we really want to be a fan engagement company,” he says. This is because engaging with fans “who come back over and over and over again are the easiest people to monetize.”
Such engagement needs to span all age groups. While the average age of a CNN viewer on linear TV in the U.S. is 58, the equivalent figure on Snapchat is early 20’s. “Nobody would have thought that people in their early twenties would have been interested in CNN, but that’s not true,” Martin says.
“Massive investments” in technology have enabled Turner to reach these varied audiences, in addition to new distribution partnerships, according to Martin.
And then there is the proposed merger with AT&T, which Seeking Alpha believes is on a track toward approval. Martin sees the deal as being able to “supercharge our growth” with the addition of 25 million DIRECTV subscribers and AT&T’s 130 million mobile customers.
While Turner won’t offer its content exclusively to AT&T’s customers “because we make money by being agnostic, we’re going to be able to learn a lot.”
Martin is optimistic about this year’s Upfronts and Newfronts negotiations with media buyers, given its lightened commercial loads and the improved quality of ads on its networks. “We’re seeing really great early success and I’m quite confident going into the Upfront this year. I think it’s going to be healthy,” Martin says.
This video was produced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>The organisation has rebooted its app line-up across phones, tablets and smartwatches, now including live and CNN Go on-demand video plus HLN streams for US users, as well as authentication via users’ pay-TV providers.
“We re-imagined how our consumers are connecting with us on mobile,” says CNN chief product officer Alex Wellen, in this video interview with Beet.TV from Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest mobile industry show.
“We had to go back… where is the consumption happening, why mess with the app?”
The answer is an interesting one.
“On the web, we have 10 times as many users as on apps,” Wellen says. “But the individuals that are on our apps are reading 13 times more page views and 17 times more video.”
Was it worth spending so much effort retooling the apps for an audience that is one tenth the size of the web user base?
Absolutely, Wellen suggests: “This audience that is one tenth of mobile web is actually larger, because of the engagement. So apps are an opportunity to engage very deeply with the audience.”
In one way, the stat is self-evident – websites are likely to have more drive-by page views by searches and social referrals, whilst app users have already taken the time to purposely invest in downloading a news brand for ongoing consumption.
So CNN is keen to better serve its most loyal mobile audience. Now the apps include a lot more video – not just news, but also shows like Anthony Bourdain’s.
And the organisation has found some success from letting CNNgo, its premium video offering, go free for promotional days, driving 20% to 25% conversion, Wellen says.
This video was produced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>“There are some things going on in the industry which are just unacceptable in my view, in terms of competitive behaviour,” WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell tells Beet.TV, in this video interview during Mobile World Congress.
“For example, we won one contract, a substantial contract – the defending agency offering signing-on inducements to the client to sign on again, giving unattainable cash guarantees on media pricing. It makes no sense, it’s suicidal.”
In the last couple of years, murmurs and grumblings have echoed around the ad industry at practices like the kind Sorrell is talking about – but few executives have gone on public record in opposition, for fear of biting the hands that feed them.
Then, last year, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) published a report lifting the lid on widespread rebates and other non-transparent dealings, finding “evidence of fundamental disconnect in the advertising industry regarding the basic nature of the advertiser-agency relationship”.
The report has caused shockwaves, pushing a new clamour for transparency that looks like being 2017’s watchword.
Sorrell appears deeply worried. “I would say, our industry has to watch itself,” he tells Beet.TV. “There are some really crazy things being done. That can’t do anybody any good in the end. It’s short-termism gone crazy.”
To him, it’s a kind of industrial self-destruct, precipitated by the irresponsibility of peers and rivals in the business.
“I remember speaking to Arun Sarin, who used to run Vodafone many years ago,” Sorrell recalls. “I said, ‘What’s the thing that most worries you?’ He said, ‘The acts of irrational competitors’. You’re only as strong as your weakest competitor.”
This video was produced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>Lisa Donohue offers this observation as she attends the Mobile World Congress 2017, the global intersection of all things mobile.
“Currently people think of mobile first,” she says in an interview with Beet.TV. “I really think that it is now mobile throughout.”
Thinking about mobile along the consumer journey encompasses such routine activities as seeking information, watching content (a brand building opportunity) and purchase/conversion, according to Donohue.
The shift must be accompanied by a new mindset with regard to looking at mobile and only seeing “advertising” potential because such thinking “hurts the mobile device,” she adds.
This is because when most people think of mobile advertising they are constrained by traditional formats like 30-second commercials, which are a “negative” on mobile devices. Instead, stress the positives: a near and personal screen, easy and seamless connections to commerce.
“It’s messaging rather than advertising,” Donohue says.
As with most ad/media industry gatherings these days, how brand marketers can harness artificial intelligence and augmented reality are big topics of discussion. “We’re only at the tip of the iceberg,” is how Donohue describes AI.
Nonetheless, many marketers are already using AI in their products or in how they conduct customer service. The challenge is finding what works best for a particular product or service.
Asked about the upcoming television Upfront negotiation season in the United States with regard to video content, Donohue stresses the need for a greater understanding of how people continue to shift their viewing across devices.
“What really needs to happen is the right measurement that actually shows how we can follow those consumers, understand who they are across the devices and get more personal with them,” Donohue says.
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the Mobile World Congress 2017, Delport opines that while this year is one of transition and incremental innovation, there’s no ignoring the strides being made by telcos. “They are organizing our digital life. They just want to be back in the race,” he says.
Artificial intelligence is one means of gaining the upper hand with mobile users. Delport cites Telefónica’s announcement at MWC heralding its new AURA platform, which the company describes as “the basis for a new relationship model with customers.” AURA will make “cognitive sense” out of the flow of user data while giving users the means to control which data are used, the company says.
Augmented knowledge about mobile device users, including sharing of devices, will help telcos understand “all these weak signals that will be activated for advertising purposes,” Delport says.
Surveying the landscape of major U.S. players like AT&T and Verizon upping the ante on content creation, he says it’s a clear sign that “convergence is back.” It’s a major reason why telcos induce users to sign up for bigger data packages so that they spend more time consuming content.
Responding to the desire for premium content, Vivendi Content in Latin America and Europe recently launched Studio+, which the company describes as “the first global premium short series offer for mobiles.” Delport, who is also Chairman of Vivendi Content, describes the offering as 10-minute episodes in a series of 10.
The backdrop to the telcos’ advertising and content plays is the increasing integration on the part of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. “They are fascinating but also a bit scary for the other players,” he says.
Delport refers to a prediction that in the next three years, 80% of mobile bandwidth will be consumed by mobile video. “It’s just beginning,” he says.
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.
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