A few days ago, Harald Neidhardt of MLOVE invited me to speak at the Sportswear International E-Fashion summit, in the mobile breakout session. The topic of my presentation was “The Authentic and the Effective”, and aimed at covering brand heritage in the age of mobile marketing. (This blog post is loosely based on my presentation.)
Harald’s passion is contagious: he’s obsessed with mobile devices and the changes they are bringing to society. He made the point that 2010 (for mobile) has a whiff of 1999 (for the web): we’re not there at all, but this side of the information and media industries is attracting colossal amounts of energy, talent and capital. The result is an amazingly vivid ecosystem, much of which is represented at MLOVE.
All attendants of the session believed in the tremendous marketing potential of these awesome little devices connected to data and voice networks. Not “phones”, as Jerome Nadel of Sagem Wireless rightfully pointed out, but mobile devices, in the broadest sense of the word.
They’re everywhere, and their hardware has become increasingly attractive. My own phone has a truly stunning screen, which makes it a daily pleasure to look at, and enhances my ability to consume information. It gives me access to plenty of content, in just a few taps.
Between the screen and the network, mobile devices are offering capabilities that we have just barely begun to explore.
Competition
However, the competition around this screen is stiff. When handled at a reasonable distance of the user’s face, the device’s screen shares attention with a hugely demanding environment. It’s only just a few degrees of my field of vision, the rest being crowded with events of a varying degree of intensity. The visual competition is intense.
But there’s also an interesting conversation you were just having with a neighbor, a budget meeting coming up that you really ought to prepare for, that’s mental competition. Mobile devices don’t monopolize your attention, because they’re visually underwhelming, and therefore are particularly prone to being one of many tasks being carried out in parallel — more so than computer use or a face-to-face conversation.
Augmented reality
Amidst this challenging environment, we’re proposing to add further layers of information: “augmented reality” is a tremendous buzz word that people around marketing departments worldwide are toying with. Implementation is underwhelming, and I have yet to come across a genuinely useful case, but it’s undoubtedly hot.
We’re going to solve all the technical problems and there will be, someday soon (any day now right?!), a way for users to whip out our device, and get an extra layer of information about our immediate environment: people, places, things.
But if we proceed along the lines of some current experiments, we will end up with a remarkably complex system, crowded with advertising, that expect us to behave awkwardly, and deliver questionable information, painstakingly reformatted and perpetually out of date.
Remember Web TV?
A major engineering project in the 90s and early 2000s, into which electronics manufacturers poured millions. It didn’t evaporate. Actually, it came to fruition: Web TV is now a reality.
It’s only isn’t the reality we were envisioning, by which the whole park of TVs would have to be upgraded to blend the two experiences into one screen. What happened instead is that media properties now know how to build companion content online that enhances and extends a TV viewer’s experience, that encourages participation, that works on different timelines than TV does, that recognize that people do stuff on their own terms, rarely on yours.
But the Web TV experiments were part and parcel of developing this understanding of cross-channel involvement.
The MLOVE attendees this suumer heard from Beverly Jackson how the Grammy awards build up dedicated groups of people sharing their enjoyment of a certain artist. Bev’s work is about making efficient and human use of an array of unconnected pieces of infrastructure.
Mobile devices aren’t immersive
We need to recognize that mobile devices are not easily immersive. Nagging is their strongest trait. And because they are always on, and don’t really know what the user is doing at any given time, they can be quite invasive. On the balance, mobile devices actually offer a weak experience.
Weak is a characteristic, not a value judgement, and can be positive. Mobile experience is not overwhelming, and lends itself to “snacking” or casual involvement.
A mobile device poorly integrated as a channel for marketing messages can damage the brand it is supposed to serve. For example, a mobile experience designed without taking into account the reality of the network speed will irritate and taint the brand with negative emotions.
But network availability, speed and latency, coverage, costs to the users, battery life, accuracy of geolocalization — those are all complicated infrastructural problems that are being tackled. They are huge roadblocks, but we’ve seen consistent and dramatic improvements over the past 10 years, and I trust we’ll see solutions progressively being offered.
Qualities
But what we will do with this infrastructure, what will it allow us to do? The obvious answer is: useful. Make actually helpful tools, and enable users to achieve tasks they want to perform. Low-tech applications such as SMS are quite relevant to enable this.
But the most important quality of mobile devices is the intimate experience afforded to the user. Touch interfaces have profoundly changed the nature of the interaction with mobile devices:
- the basic gesture is a caress, performed by the fingertips, rather than the more mechanical keystroke, encouraging a gentler, less functional interaction
- the device’s response is taking place in the same location as the finger’s touch, strongly reinforcing the anthropomorphism and emotional involvement
- direct manipulation of information and features, rather than symbolic access with the mouse or conceptual devices such as scroll bars, reduces the computer’s presence
For me, this intimate character of mobile devices is extremely powerful. No matter how crude the underlying technology, the interaction is still taking place at your fingertips, a delicate, sensitive, subtle part of the body. Increasingly literal interfaces further reinforce the intimacy.
Emotions
Strong emotions can be conveyed at the fingertips, and this really was the point of my presentation: weak yet intimate, mobile devices are conducive to emotion, and therefore offer a strong potential to carry brand messages, which need emotion to have any impact on people.
This will certainly prove to be a challenge, because so far, brands have usually just turned up the volume, to try and cope with an increasingly noisy environment. Buildings wrapped in advertising, blanketing of all media channels, “below-the-line” advertising that ensures messages are seen and heard outside of the usual avenues of brand communication, recruitment and grooming of celebrities and widespread sponsoring of causes and events, user profiling and ad targeting — nothing is too expensive to reach consumers.
Mobile is definitely a new channel, something brands and advertisers aren’t very good at yet. I contend that brand truth, the genuine behavior of a group of people who are brought together by a brand, will be the factor that unlocks the power of mobile devices.
Like it’s 1999: the rise of mobile marketing
A few days ago, Harald Neidhardt of MLOVE invited me to speak at the Sportswear International E-Fashion summit, in the mobile breakout session. The topic of my presentation was “The Authentic and the Effective”, and aimed at covering brand heritage in the age of mobile marketing. (This blog post is loosely based on my presentation.)
Harald’s passion is contagious: he’s obsessed with mobile devices and the changes they are bringing to society. He made the point that 2010 (for mobile) has a whiff of 1999 (for the web): we’re not there at all, but this side of the information and media industries is attracting colossal amounts of energy, talent and capital. The result is an amazingly vivid ecosystem, much of which is represented at MLOVE.
All attendants of the session believed in the tremendous marketing potential of these awesome little devices connected to data and voice networks. Not “phones”, as Jerome Nadel of Sagem Wireless rightfully pointed out, but mobile devices, in the broadest sense of the word.
They’re everywhere, and their hardware has become increasingly attractive. My own phone has a truly stunning screen, which makes it a daily pleasure to look at, and enhances my ability to consume information. It gives me access to plenty of content, in just a few taps.
Between the screen and the network, mobile devices are offering capabilities that we have just barely begun to explore.
Competition
However, the competition around this screen is stiff. When handled at a reasonable distance of the user’s face, the device’s screen shares attention with a hugely demanding environment. It’s only just a few degrees of my field of vision, the rest being crowded with events of a varying degree of intensity. The visual competition is intense.
But there’s also an interesting conversation you were just having with a neighbor, a budget meeting coming up that you really ought to prepare for, that’s mental competition. Mobile devices don’t monopolize your attention, because they’re visually underwhelming, and therefore are particularly prone to being one of many tasks being carried out in parallel — more so than computer use or a face-to-face conversation.
Augmented reality
Amidst this challenging environment, we’re proposing to add further layers of information: “augmented reality” is a tremendous buzz word that people around marketing departments worldwide are toying with. Implementation is underwhelming, and I have yet to come across a genuinely useful case, but it’s undoubtedly hot.
We’re going to solve all the technical problems and there will be, someday soon (any day now right?!), a way for users to whip out our device, and get an extra layer of information about our immediate environment: people, places, things.
But if we proceed along the lines of some current experiments, we will end up with a remarkably complex system, crowded with advertising, that expect us to behave awkwardly, and deliver questionable information, painstakingly reformatted and perpetually out of date.
Remember Web TV?
A major engineering project in the 90s and early 2000s, into which electronics manufacturers poured millions. It didn’t evaporate. Actually, it came to fruition: Web TV is now a reality.
It’s only isn’t the reality we were envisioning, by which the whole park of TVs would have to be upgraded to blend the two experiences into one screen. What happened instead is that media properties now know how to build companion content online that enhances and extends a TV viewer’s experience, that encourages participation, that works on different timelines than TV does, that recognize that people do stuff on their own terms, rarely on yours.
But the Web TV experiments were part and parcel of developing this understanding of cross-channel involvement.
The MLOVE attendees this suumer heard from Beverly Jackson how the Grammy awards build up dedicated groups of people sharing their enjoyment of a certain artist. Bev’s work is about making efficient and human use of an array of unconnected pieces of infrastructure.
Mobile devices aren’t immersive
We need to recognize that mobile devices are not easily immersive. Nagging is their strongest trait. And because they are always on, and don’t really know what the user is doing at any given time, they can be quite invasive. On the balance, mobile devices actually offer a weak experience.
Weak is a characteristic, not a value judgement, and can be positive. Mobile experience is not overwhelming, and lends itself to “snacking” or casual involvement.
A mobile device poorly integrated as a channel for marketing messages can damage the brand it is supposed to serve. For example, a mobile experience designed without taking into account the reality of the network speed will irritate and taint the brand with negative emotions.
But network availability, speed and latency, coverage, costs to the users, battery life, accuracy of geolocalization — those are all complicated infrastructural problems that are being tackled. They are huge roadblocks, but we’ve seen consistent and dramatic improvements over the past 10 years, and I trust we’ll see solutions progressively being offered.
Qualities
But what we will do with this infrastructure, what will it allow us to do? The obvious answer is: useful. Make actually helpful tools, and enable users to achieve tasks they want to perform. Low-tech applications such as SMS are quite relevant to enable this.
But the most important quality of mobile devices is the intimate experience afforded to the user. Touch interfaces have profoundly changed the nature of the interaction with mobile devices:
For me, this intimate character of mobile devices is extremely powerful. No matter how crude the underlying technology, the interaction is still taking place at your fingertips, a delicate, sensitive, subtle part of the body. Increasingly literal interfaces further reinforce the intimacy.
Emotions
Strong emotions can be conveyed at the fingertips, and this really was the point of my presentation: weak yet intimate, mobile devices are conducive to emotion, and therefore offer a strong potential to carry brand messages, which need emotion to have any impact on people.
This will certainly prove to be a challenge, because so far, brands have usually just turned up the volume, to try and cope with an increasingly noisy environment. Buildings wrapped in advertising, blanketing of all media channels, “below-the-line” advertising that ensures messages are seen and heard outside of the usual avenues of brand communication, recruitment and grooming of celebrities and widespread sponsoring of causes and events, user profiling and ad targeting — nothing is too expensive to reach consumers.
Mobile is definitely a new channel, something brands and advertisers aren’t very good at yet. I contend that brand truth, the genuine behavior of a group of people who are brought together by a brand, will be the factor that unlocks the power of mobile devices.