2007 will be the year of mobile. Nope. Well surely, 2008 will be the year of mobile. Not so much. Unfortunately, I don’t see 2009 as the year mobile marketing achieves ubiquity either. Why is this? The pieces are in place. About three-quarters of the total market report some level of mobile phone usage (over 80% of adults age 18-44 years of age are wireless users). Text messaging costs should not be used as an excuse. Market research firm Gartner says that text messaging has increased 32 percent year-over-year and will continue to do so into 2009, despite rising costs. So what’s the problem?
The marketing community at-large has failed to embrace mobile as one medium acting in concert with others as part of a cross-media, comprehensive, and interactive strategy. Instead, many agencies view it as an add-on. They offer clients the chance to run a ‘mobile campaign’ instead of instinctively incorporating a mobile component to the overall campaign from the start.
The most literal example of this I can provide is the ad:tech conference series. ad:tech classifies itself as ‘the event for digital marketing.’ When attending show the few months back in New York, I was looking forward to visiting the Go-Mobile Zone, which was supposed to highlight mobile companies. Excitement quickly turned to surprise and disappointment when I found that this ‘zone’ was completely separated from the main show flow (as opposed to in the exhibit hall itself). This only served to perpetuate the idea that mobile is an independent medium, when in reality, the success of mobile marketing is so often dependent on the success of the cross-medium marketing that accompanies it. ad:tech 2009 in San Francisco will be no different, as evidenced by the floor plan. What are advertising and marketing professionals supposed to think?
Screens, screens, screens.
Americans now spend the majority of their days glaring at one screen or another. More and more, marketers and advertisers are faced with the struggle of crafting a fragmented narrative that transcends medium. The industry has failed to grasp (or at best, failed to respond to the notion) that the third screen is now the first. Mobile devices are omnipresent. TVs are relegated to the home, and not even laptops are accessible everywhere. It’s the cell phone that is always just a pocket away. How can they expect to successfully tell a story across so many screens when they largely ignore the one most prevalent?
Are there reasons why agencies have not correctly embraced the mobile medium? Of course, and I’ll do my best to explore this in the future. Unfortunately, I believe it comes down to a lack of understanding of how mobile media differs from traditional media. With that confusion emerges an ability to capitalize on mobile both from a strategic planning and creative perspective. A year from now, will we be wondering if 2010 will be the year of mobile? I hope not.
