Marketing is hard, mobile is not: Air2Web exec
June 10, 2008
Mark Emery is senior director of agency relations at Air2Web
New York is flush with mobile marketing executives today with the Mobile Marketing Forum doing its annual run. Mark Emery, mobile marketing services firm Air2Web's senior director of agency relations, stopped by our office to talk mobile.
Mr. Emery discussed issues related to mobile, its influencers and its destiny. Mobile Marketer's Giselle Abramovich interviewed. Excerpts:
How do you think the launch of the first iPhone impacted mobile marketing?
The iPhone opened a lot of people's eyes to what their phones are capable of. I think that most people didn't know they could do more than just voice calls.
"American Idol" really started SMS and the iPhone encouraged users to interact with their phones more.
What do you think about the new iPhone?
Its 3G and will make the browsing experience faster.
You know what bothers me is the fact that marketers don't optimize their sites for mobile because the iPhone Web experience is a rich one.
But take Starbucks, for example. Starbucks realized that when people go to the Starbucks site from their phone, they are usually looking for a location of a store. So now when users visit the Starbucks site from their Web-enabled phone, the store locator feature is readily accessible, as opposed to the Web site, where it is not as front-and-center.
Can you think of an interesting recent campaign?
The mattress company Select Comfort conducted a mobile campaign that asked consumers to text their ZIP code to receive targeted coupons to their phones. It's really simple and that's what I like about it.
The results were astonishing, while the campaign wasn't all that fancy in terms of innovative technology. But in the end it's all about results and people seem to forget that.
If a mattress company can do so well, there isn't a company out there that can't do mobile.
What do you think is the current state of mobile marketing?
Well, in the beginning days, the mobile industry was led by mobile companies. Now we are seeing the influx of creative agencies and the traditional top-tier agencies and you see brands not just selling digital content, but instead using digital to promote their brand. It's an exciting time.
What do you expect from the Mobile Marketing Forum?
I want people to stop saying that mobile is hard. Marketing is hard. Mobile is not. The hard part is figuring out who is the right audience, how to target them, where and what time of the day. Once all that is figured out, the mobile part is a synch.
Where do you see mobile in the next five years?
We will see the line blurred. There will be marketing campaigns that leverage what's best about every digital medium. You will see mobile as a way to digitize stuff that's traditional.
I remember asking a woman at a conference how much of her ad budget she spends on online. She answered 100 percent. I couldn't help but ask her to justify spending all the money on something people use sometimes and none on something people have with them all the time.
Mobile shifts the way marketers and brand managers have to think about their brand and, now, the consumer's ability to define how they interact with the brand.