Loyalty rewards offerings such as airline frequent-flier platforms could erode as marketers gain the ability to provide responses to consumer behavior in real time. While traditional loyalty programs segment customers into groups based on long-time patterns of behavior, the data and analysis afforded by mobile will allow marketers to treat customers accordingly in real time as they exhibit certain behaviors. 

?I really do believe things like tiered loyalty programs will go away,? said Michael Griffith, executive creative director, Ogilvy & Mather?s Bottle Rocket. ?The example I like to give is airlines. You have to fly a certain number of miles to be classified as gold, and a certain number of miles to be classified as platinum, and that?s kind of silly. 

?The reason it was set up that way because there was a time when you didn?t have real-time access to real-time data to understand people?s behaviors and what they were doing. Nowadays we know exactly what you are doing in that moment.? 

Mobile Marketer presented Mobile Marketing Summit: Holiday Focus 2014 

The shift toward real-time loyalty rewards is one of several mobile trends identified by Mr. Griffith in his presentation. It is closely related to some of the other trends he identified, including location detection through beacons and the increase in analytics and insights that a mobile-equipped society affords.

?It used to be that analytics were about crowds, and big numbers,? Mr. Griffith said. ?But now we can get very specific.? 

He cited gaming as a segment of the mobile industry that has excelled at analytics and insights.

?They know when a user is going to buy a power boost to get to the next level,? he said. 

The use of beacons is beginning to add even more specificity to the customer data that marketers can leverage. 

Other mobile trends that are gaining traction include what Mr. Griffith referred to as ?continuous commerce.? 

With mobile, commerce is happening all the time, sometimes both in store and on mobile devices at the same time.

That trend stands to be further accelerated by the potential for apps to begin to work together. Rather than build an app that performs secondary and tertiary functions that are already provided by other apps, Mr. Griffith suggested that marketers instead look for partnerships with existing apps, and explore the possibilities of sharing data from app to app. 

?Just think about the data you can collect with beacons around the store,? Mr. Griffith said. ?When data can be shared with other apps or across brands, that?s where the fun starts to happen.? 

Other trends include hardware integration, which is bringing us connected cars and smartwatches. 

Some consumer trends that could impact the growth of mobile include a fresh round of techno-paranoia spurred in part by some recent financial data leaks. That indicates that marketers have to be all that much more careful about their use of data, and especially in how they communicate to their customers about how they will use the data.

?If too much magic happens here,? Mr. Griffith said, holding up his smartphone, ?it can start to seem evil.? 

One consumer trend that marketers can turn to their advantage is that society is moving toward becoming one of ?makers,? Mr. Griffith said. He defines "makers" people who enjoy creating things, whether that is a bicycle assembled from parts ordered online, or creating and publishing content to a Web site.

If marketers can identify these ?makers? who are also fans of their brands, the brands have a lot to gain.

?Even if they are not a maker, they are a publisher, we all know that,? Mr. Griffith said. ?How can you harness the power of all these makers and all these publishers for your brand??

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