Mereja

Author: B. Bonin Bough

  • Four Ideas for Creating Mobile Strategy

    Mobile technology presents all marketers with a tantalizing proposition. Mobile devices function like an extension of ourselves, present throughout every moment of our day, an arm’s reach away at night, and panic-inducing when outside our reach. They are globally ubiquitous, and ownership frequently transcends economic and social boundaries.

    The chance to tap into this ever-present and intimate consumer channel at such tremendous scale seems like a no-brainer for marketers. But marketing spend on mobile pales in comparison to time spent there by consumers. The opportunity is clear, but how to seize it is not. For most organizations, successfully engaging consumers via mobile — or even giving the effort a serious try — is still a mirage. The same skepticism that made companies miss the boat on digital is now at risk of keeping companies on the sidelines of mobile instead of making efforts to lead and win in the space.

    The key reason behind this hesitation is the speed at which mobile reached scale, coupled with the unrelenting pace of disruption in the mobile ecosystem. To understand this rapid scaling relative to other landmark consumer electronics, consider this: It took 38 years for the radio to reach an audience of 50 million consumers, 13 years for television, four years for the Internet, but only two years for the iPhone. It’s daunting to keep current with such an in-flux marketplace, not to mention the myriad consumer behavior changes that it drives. Even more challenging, especially for the ROI-driven marketer, is deploying a mobile strategy that moves the needle for the business in the near-term, but also anticipates the future.

    At my company, Mondelēz International, we’re bullish on mobile because it’s so right for our particular business. Here are four ideas we’re embracing as part of our core mobile framework. While many of these strategies apply both within and outside the consumer packaged goods industry, there is no secret sauce and all marketers should ask themselves what their unique mobile framework should be in 2013, and beyond.

    1. Use the power of mobile-at-retail and re-think the impulse purchase

    Since consumers carry them at every moment of the day, mobile phones have the potential to be extremely influential on the path-to-purchase and in-store experience. By using location and behavior-based cues, savvy brands can reach consumers when and where it matters most. This could take the form of a mobile-based deal on gum mapped to a consumer’s daily commute when people are most likely to be chewing gum, or delivering a coupon on candy to a consumer’s phone while they’re in a long check-out line, engrossed in their phone instead of looking up at product displays.

    2. Get in on the ground floor of mobile video
    Globally, there is an increased demand for paid media, particularly TV, which is driving cost inflation and putting pressure on companies year over year to reach the same number of people. The growth of mobile video consumption, particularly around content like music videos and movie trailers, has led to increased mobile video inventory. This inventory not only lives in a sharing-rich environment (the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that over 92 percent of mobile video watchers share the videos they watch), it is also much more cost-effective for the advertiser, just like Google mobile search advertising, where click-through rates are soaring but marketers are still only dipping their toes in the water. . In many markets around the world, companies have the chance to seize a first-mover advantage by investing early in this growing consumer touch point, much in the same way that companies that made early, scaled investments in TV advertising in its youngest years secured long-term cost advantages.

    3. Amplify TV spend through integration
    Like mobile, TV is highly scaled, but market fragmentation, rising costs and changes in consumer viewing behavior are driving down the overall effectiveness of TV advertising relative to other media. But all is not lost: research shows that connecting second-screen extensions to TV spend can actually multiply its ROI. There are a growing number of powerful second-screen technologies, from GetGlue to Viggle. It’s critical to understand the benefits of each and capitalize on them now.

    4. Monetize mobile media

    The monetization of mobile can happen not only through e-commerce and paid apps but also through in-app purchases. More and more brands are seizing the opportunity to create mobile experiences for their consumers. When done properly, these experiences can function as more than marketing — they can actually add to the bottom line. We’ve seen this first-hand with the performance of our app, “Twist, Lick and Dunk,” a mobile game that digitally re-imagines the childhood tradition of how to eat OREOs. Through in-app ads and purchases, where players buy virtual currency to unlock special OREOs, the app is on track to be cash-positive. In its first few months, it was downloaded nearly two million times and has generated over $50,000 in revenue.

    Adapting to changes in the mobile landscape is a requirement for any competitive brand. But, it’s easier to see into the future when you have a stake in building the innovations that shape it. The key to creating your mobile framework is not only staying a few steps ahead, but also influencing where those steps lead.

    The Future of Advertising
    An HBR Insight Center

  • The Power of Real-Time Advertising

    Now that the Super Bowl is over and we know who won the game, everyone’s asking who won the marketing battle that surrounds it. There’s so much discussion every year about who got what spot, what they paid for it, and whether or not they should have released their commercial early. But the biggest storyline out of this year’s Super Bowl had less to do with the commercials themselves and more to do with the way that brands engaged with events and consumers in real-time.

    While there will always be debate about which TV spots deliver the most ROI, one thing is certain: no matter how much you’ve planned ahead, and no matter how deeply integrated your campaign may be, there’s no better (or cheaper) way to cut through the clutter than to improvise. The idea of improvisational marketing is a dangerous one to many of the big brands that advertise around the Super Bowl, for obvious reasons. Even the slightest misstep or off-color remark can go viral and forever damage a brand within minutes. But responding to events in real-time, as they unfold, and weaving your brand into the conversation in a way that entertains and supports your brand proposition, can be the most powerful marketing of all.

    Sunday’s power outage provided the perfect surprise for brands to pounce on creatively. Tide shrewdly tweeted, “We can’t get your #blackout. But we can get your stains out.” In a dig at their luxury car rival, Audi tweeted, “Sending some LEDs to the @MBUSA Superdome right now…” At Mondelēz International, our Oreo brand team and their agency partners sat together in a war room and came up with this gem, which has since been re-tweeted more than 15,000 times:

    This was a big, albeit unplanned moment, but the beauty of real-time content is that there’s always something interesting happening in the world, and always an audience who cares about it. The ubiquity of digital technology and mobile devices enables people at far corners of the globe to share moments together, regardless of where they’re located, their economic status, or how old they are. By focusing content development around these shared cultural moments, marketers can transcend the demographics-driven targeting that has for so long defined the industry, reaching more people in a more relevant way.

    We saw firsthand the power of tapping into big cultural moments when we celebrated Oreo’s 100th birthday in 2012. We produced 100 consecutive “Daily Twists,” spotlighting global cultural developments, as they happened, through an Oreo lens. Covering everything from LGBT Pride Month to the Mars Rover landing, we were able to join the global conversation with fresh content, and this timeliness nearly tripled the level of consumer engagement compared to the three months prior to the campaign.

    The biggest challenge for brands that want to engage their consumers in real-time is that consumer conversations move at incredible speed due to social and mobile technologies. For large brands, making sense of that conversation requires rapidly sifting through vast amounts of data, but also making that data available across functions within the organization in a way that empowers brands to translate social insights into actions.

    Only by gathering, analyzing, and broadcasting these data in real-time do organizations position themselves to deliver on a wide variety of organizational challenges. By empowering brands to make strategic decisions on the fly, companies and their agencies can execute on smarter media plays that have small windows of opportunity, such as observing earned media trends and adjusting their paid media strategies to amplify them. Just as important is that there’s a cross-functional process in place, best achieved by getting everyone in the same room, so that multiple departments can see, evaluate, and act on data and conversation they wouldn’t otherwise see.

    Beyond process and proximity, the most critical point is that visualizing data tells a story and changes culture in a way that numbers themselves cannot. By giving everyone access to the same data-driven picture, you put the onus on the group to understand and act on the trends, challenges, and opportunities that emerge. This culture of listening, accountability, and collaboration is what brands need behind them to succeed in a real-time world.