“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 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.

“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.

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.