OK, so Gartner recently revealed that Smart Phone sales were up 27% (whilst standard mobile sales were down 6%). The iPhone was a major contributor with 13% of all new handsets sold in 2nd quarter 2009 up from 3% in the corresponding period of 2008.
I haven’t seen a personal device get traction like this since the Sony Walkman in the 80s and there’s a real simple reason. It’s not the phone, the phone is actually rubbish – it’s the promise of a truly decent mobile web experience. The crux of which lies in the ability to zoom in and out with ease – funny that whilst the cynics were saying that mobile web will never work because the screen is too small, Apple invented a way to take screen size out of the picture…so to speak.
And Joe Public loves this new type of web experience. According to AdMob’s April 2009 Mobile Metrics Report Apple’s iPhone accounted for 43% of all mobile web traffic despite having just 8% of all handset sales in the same period. So, mobile internet usage is on the march and yet many digital marketing folks don’t seem to be paying attention.
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There is a time and a place for the all singing, all dancing rich media ads that literally jump from the page, spin around and attempt to “cut-through”but let’s not also forget the gentle art of contextual web advertising – the art of making advertising “a part of the page”, something to read, not something to block.
This isn’t solely about disguising ads to look like content. It is also about taking a broader view of the publisher’s audience, what’s missing from their user experience and delivering an “ad” at the right time and in the right place in a language and tone consistent with the content they are viewing.
Hate to use the same old examples but probably the best example of this strategy in effect is Google Adwords/Adsense. The ads are visually similar to the page content, they are (often) content matched and form a part of the site’s function (the ads are search results from a search engine).
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The 4Ps of the marketing mix are written in stone (Price, Product, Place, Promotion). Etched beneath are the 3 additional Ps of the service marketing mix (Physical Evidence, Process and People).
The last of these, ‘People’, refers to the folks we employ and how they communicate with customers. But in the age of the Internet,the population is beginning to dictate the types of product/service people would like to see – they are the ones initiating the communication not the organisation.
This ‘Public Input’ is beginning to have an impact in the mix and some organisations are harnessing it’s power. Running shoes designed by the customer, ads designed by the audience; it’s early days but the newly empowered general public are finding their feet and beginning to voice their opinion.
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Are we sitting comfortably?
Then let’s begin.
Most successful global brands have a story, you don’t have to think too hard; Apple, Google and Virgin for example. But so do the more successful local brands you use every day. The little Italian butcher that’s been going for three generations, the café that sources their milk from their sister’s organic dairy farm and the local micro-brewery that started because the brewer couldn’t find an ale he liked so he brewed his own. We love these stories and want to be a part of it all, a character, even if it’s just a bit-part player. We’ll even excuse momentary lapses of product quality and put it down to character flaw, let’s face it the most believable characters are rarely perfect.
The best brands (both large and small) reinforce and remind us of their story at every opportunity. The story telling starts from within and spreads, the management tells the staff, the staff tell the customers and the customers tell each other. And like all stories, we want to hear what happens next, we sit on the edge of our seat and eagerly anticipate the next chapter.
In a world of increasing media saturation and information overflow we seek out simple stories – things we can connect readily to, thus outsourcing the need for objective thought.
So start by unearthing your brand story, find out how a product came about, why something evolved the way it did and what’s happening next. Let your customers participate in shaping this story (everyone loves a bit of audience participation) and get excited again about your communication objectives. Remember you now work in the “Story Telling” department. Just remember that fiction is not allowed 
start by pressing pause
It’s a million miles an hour out there but you won’t succeed by trying to keep up.
Start by pressing pause.
Unsubscribe from the web for a few hours and start thinking about your business again, it’s remarkably productive and therapeutic too. You’ll realise there’s more to successful digital marketing than promotion, promotion, promotion – you’ll start to think about your product/service, how it’s priced, positioned and distributed. You’ll start seeing the gaps, the absolute glaring holes and will start thinking about what needs to be done to fix things before you throw the promotion into full swing again.
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