Mobile Strategy Lacking for Many Marketers

Even fewer have a strategy that works. Studies find consumers do research on smartphones, but make purchases on tablets

Regardless of what device you’re using to read this blog, here’s a stat that may startle you: Only one in six (16%) marketers has a formalized mobile strategy according to a new report from the CMO Council. That’s depressing when you consider that there are more than 6 billion mobile phones in use worldwide and they’re one of the most common tools that consumers use to do their research.

CMO’s latest mobile advertising report reveals that mobile relationship marketing (MRM) was the single most investigated, tested and piloted marketing activity of 2012. However, because it’s still hard to measure the effectiveness of mobile marketing, many marketers still have doubts about the ROI they’re getting from mobile. More troublesome: researchers found that among marketers who do have a strategy in place, only one in seven (14%) are satisfied with their results.

Lack of case studies and other barriers

Meanwhile, the majority of marketers (77 percent) say the lack of case studies demonstrating best practices is a hurdle. Other challenges include the ongoing fragmentation within mobile media, such as devices using different operating systems like Android and iOS, as well as the lack of a common technology platform for mobile analytics. CMO’s findings seem to mirror an IAB study launched last week that found a “lack of understanding” about mobile among both brands and agencies. That, according to IAB, is still the largest barrier to bigger mobile advertising budgets.

Phone = research; Tablet = purchase

Researchers now conclude that the smartphone is the device for research while the tablet is the device for purchasing. According to Nielsen and a separate study by the Global Web Marketing Team at Lenovo, nearly two thirds (65%) of consumers used smartphones only for research while one third (32%) used smartphones for research and purchasing. For tablets, almost half (47%) used them to do research and the same percentage used them both for research and purchasing.

When asked whether they preferred to download an app or use a mobile website to research and purchase products, 11 percent of consumers said they prefer to download an app, 33 percent said a mobile-optimized website and more than half (56%) said it doesn’t matter as long as they are satisfied with the information they are given. The key takeaway here folks is satisfaction with the results.

Macro View

The current market pullback is a little disconcerting, no doubt. But our view is that it’s more a function of the looming March 1 sequester deadline and Italy’s political instability than a signal of a true market correction.

There are still plenty of signs for optimism. Last week the Fed said it would continue to buy bonds until the labor market improves, which bodes well for keeping interest rates steady. Although jobs and manufacturing data remain disappointing, the housing market keeps improving. A report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) showed existing home sales rose 0.4 percent last month pushing the supply of homes on the market to a 13-YEAR LOW! Meanwhile, NAR said the median price of a home nationwide is 12.3 percent higher than it was at this time a year ago.

Conclusion

The financial and economic cycles are increasingly decoupled. While the steepest phase of the stock market recovery may have already occurred, we’re still in the earlier stages of the economic recovery. Many business and consumers are just starting to shake off their slumber and pessimism. Good luck happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seriously. If you haven’t done so already, get your mobile house in order before it’s too late!

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TAGS: mobile, MRM mobile relationship marketing, CMO Council National Association of Realtors, Lenovo, tablets and smartphones for research, Nielsen

Why B2B Marketers Care About TV Upfront Week

LinkedIn preferred by the financial elite (see below)

Broadcast television—emphasis on “broad”—still has merit for mass consumer advertisers pushing cars, consumer staples, travel and movies. There will still be plenty of buzz this week when the advertising “up front” season kicks off. But, the live ratings for networks programs have declined for 14 straight quarters, according to media buying firm, Horizon Media. Meanwhile, Horizon says online viewing is up more than 46 percent year-over-year and Nielsen estimates there will be 350 million Web-enabled TV devices in use worldwide by 2015.

NY Times media pundit, David Carr quipped today, “it isn’t just the early adopters that legacy television has to be concerned about: there is a whole cohort of consumers on the way who are non-adopters of TV as we have historically conceived it.”

Our take: It’s not only that “appointment TV” continues to drop precipitously (i.e. American Idol ratings off 30 percent), but viewers want to consume their favorite content when they’re good and ready to do so. That same DVR mindset is affecting how they engage with your email newsletters, alerts, podcasts, videos and white papers.

Don’t worry about your clicks, opens, views and Likes the first 12 to 24 hours of a digital campaign. In the same way that your target buyers TiVo their favorite shows for later viewing, they’re archiving their “must-read/must view” work-related content and plowing through it over the weekend or late at night when they’re more relaxed and less distracted. We see this trend again and again with our clients.

Next week we’ll talk about using the metrics that matters—not the McMetrics that are easiest to collect.


LinkedIn preferred by the financial elite

According to the latest quarterly study by Janrain Engage, people use Facebook to interact with friends and family, Twitter to follow influencers and share opinions, LinkedIn for their professional network, and Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail to communicate directly with contacts.  Combined, these networks boast over 1.5 billion accounts. 

However, it’s a little different for financial advisors and high net worth investors (HNWI) of more than $100,000 in investable assets. A new commissioned by LinkedIn released late last week at the Financial Services Summit in New York identified some important takeaways:

1.For about one third of advisors (30%), social media plays a role in marketing and researchers expect it to be used by over half over advisors in 2013. Nearly three fourths of financial advisors have used at least one social network for business in the past year. Researchers also found that many advisors are not taking advantage of the platform. About 5 million high net worth individuals (HNWIs in industry parlance) use social media to inform financial decisions, and of those who consult a financial advisor regularly, more than half (52%) would value interacting with that person via social media -- but only 4 percent do so today.

2.LinkedIn says about two-thirds of U.S. online adults with an investment account have at least one social network profile, and Forrester Research says nearly all households with more than $1 million in investable assets are now online.

3.Social media adopters are more demanding. More than half (53%) of HNWIs expect relevant and timely content, 48 percent want greater transparency of information and 45 percent value real-time interactive conversations.

4.Among advisors who have used at least one social network for business, 91 percent have used LinkedIn; 32 percent, Facebook; 28 percent, Google+; and 22 percent, Twitter.

Our Take: Great stats, but now LinkedIn starts to push it over the top. For instance, the study also found social media improves brand perception of a financial company, labeling it as "innovative." Researchers claim “Not only do investors expect finance companies to advertise on LinkedIn, but doing so improves consumer brand perception toward the financial company by 7 percent. That same financial company advertising on another social platform could result in an 11 percent net decrease in favorability,” according to LinkedIn's findings.

Conclusion

Whether you’re in mass consumer, financial services or nuts-and-bolts B2B, your target customers—not you—decide if and when they’ll spend time with your offering. That’s the world we live in. Just as “mass” is fading from the lexicon of mass media, “blast” is fading from the world of B2B.

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TAGS: LinkedIn, Forrester Researcher, Horizon Media, Janrain Engage, Financial Services Summit, Nielsen, David Carr

Financial Markets Decoupled from Economy, Ad Sentiment

Ad spend continues modest increase thanks to automotive and financial services. Online video most popular on tablet vs. smartphone or social networks

The financial markets have never been a reliable indicator of true economic growth (or lack thereof). They’re a better indicator of investor psychology than they are of underlying corporate earnings or consumer spending intentions and right now uncertainty is trumping confidence. If nothing else, we’re officially in a global economy so when a Euro Zone country gets overextended or when China overheats or plays games with its currency, we all suffer. Hey, our little banking crisis in 2008 wreaked as much havoc overseas as it did at home. Payback’s a bitch.

The markets usually tank in October anyway—check your history books for that month in 2008, 1987, 1929 etc. True, most indices are close to 20 percent off their recent highs in April—a technical bear market signal, but they’re about a percentage point or two off where they were a year ago. We don’t remember things being too rosy last October either.

Right now things are very uncertain, but it doesn’t mean they’re horrible. Housing prices remain depressed, but their holding steady. The jobless rate is way too high for an alleged recover, but slightly improving. U.S. vehicle sales rose almost 10 percent in September to their highest level in five months. More impressive, the Big 3 Detroit automakers significantly outgained Toyota and Honda. Even in our auto-dependent nation, folks aren’t going to shell out tens of thousands for a new vehicle unless they’re pretty sure they can finance the purchase. Perhaps more telling, bank stocks are taking a beating right now but financial services companies are still leading the charge on the ad spending front.

Ad spending up modestly

For the first half of 2011, Nielsen research found that U.S. advertisers overall spent 5 percent more in the first half of 2011 than they did in the first half of 2010 and the categories showing the greatest increase were financially-oriented, said Randall Beard, the global head of advertising solutions for Nielsen. Auto insurance increased 25 percent from first half of 2011, bank services increased 24 percent and financial investment services increased 19 percent. “People are very interested in saving money, getting the best possible deals and making sure their financial situation is as strong as it can be,” Beard told the New York Times in a recent article about his organization’s findings.

Kantar Media’s latest research found that ad spending in major media in the United States in the second quarter rose 2.8 percent from the same period a year ago. The percentage gain was the sixth quarterly increase in a row since the end of 2009, according to Kantar Media data, but it is the smallest of the six. For the first six months of the year, Kantar estimates ad spending was up 3.2 percent from the first half of last year.

The numbers for the second quarter “are painting a mixed picture,” Jon Swallen, senior vice president for research at the Kantar Media North America unit of Kantar Media, said in a statement. On one hand, “a majority of media types actually improved their performance” from the first quarter to the second quarter, Mr. Swallen said. On the other hand, spending growth among the 100 biggest advertisers “stalled” in the second quarter, he added, “and the ad market became more dependent on the comparatively smaller budgets of midsized advertisers as the main source of growth.”

Tracked by media type: Internet advertising was up 10.4 percent and magazines were up 2.9 percent; television, up 1.8 percent; and radio, up 1.4 percent.
Marketers respecting consumers

We popped in last week at the Online Media & Marketing Association conference in New York and were impressed by the attendance levels, the quality of the questions during Q&A sessions and the overall positive buzz and energy despite the gloomy economy. As MediaPost editor Joe Mandese noted, “Marketers are growing up. We came out of an era in which marketers didn’t respect consumers, they just force fed them their messages. Now they have to engage them, earn their trust, before trying to sell them. Is this the dawn of UX (user experience) media planning?”

This week, the 8th annual Advertising Week confab convenes in New York and most of the media pooh bahs expect advertising spending to grow modestly in 2012 and 2013. Tim Jones, CEO of ZenithOptimedia www.zenithoptimedia.com thinks the quadrennial effect of 2012 presidential elections and London Olympic games will give media sellers a lift and Russ Sapienza, senior partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers said most major advertisers still want to sell products in a slow-growth economy. They don’t want to “take [media] money off the table” even when they may put the brakes on major capital investments like factories and infrastructure.

Online display shifting from direct response to branding tool

A number of panelist indicated that the “wow” factor of new ad technology is wearing off and now we’re back to focusing on content—what you actually put inside all those cool ad spaces and time slots. While many media buyers still cling to clicks, impressions and conversions to measure performance. But the more important metrics often point to return on ad spend, online searches for brand names, product recall, and sales.

New research from the online agency Collective indicates that that online display advertising continues to shift from a direct-response form of advertising to branding media.

"The Digital Advertising 2011: A Portrait of Conflict" study released by Collective finds that 57 percent of agencies believe the majority of their display objectives are to build the brand, yet only 11 percent cite ad creative as critical to the campaign's success. Still, three in five (60%) agencies cite brand recall and intent to purchase as the most important measures of online success. However, clicks and conversions remain the key criteria agencies say they use to evaluate media, according to the Collective study.

Want folks to see your Videos? Research says viewers embrace tablets, more than smartphones and social media

A new PwC study finds that consumers increasingly embrace alternative screens to watch TV shows and movies. Nearly three in five surveyed consumers (58%) said they spend more time now viewing movies and TV shows online than they did a year ago. "This was further validated in qualitative discussions, where consumers confirmed that they spend more time using their Internet-connected devices, especially iPads," stated the PwC report. The study emphasized that people considered tablets a "wholly different mobile viewing experience" compared to smartphones, given screen size. Less than one-quarter (23%) had an interest in watching premium video on smartphones. PwC said the lack of enthusiasm for mobile video is consistent with research it has done over the last 18 months.

The research also noted growing interest from a year ago in cloud-based media storage offerings. The idea of a digital locker for music, shows, movies or other content especially appealed to more mature audiences, people in their late-30s to mid-40s, given their understanding of storage technology. Younger people were also intrigued, but had concerns about pricing.


The PwC study found social media was the channel people were least willing to pay extra for to obtain premium content, in part because there's typically no charge for using most social networks. Two-thirds of survey participants said they wouldn't pay anything to watch movies and TV via social properties. But because distribution through social media is still nascent, the consulting firm suggested there is still an opportunity for Hollywood studios and TV networks to leverage Facebook and other social sites.

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