Putting your message in the right hands

With mobile devices more popular than ever, how can brands target the right people in the right way? Millennial Media’s marketing director EMEA, Stephen Jenkins, explains

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Sponsored by Millennial Media

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How many times on average do you look at your phone? According to the recent RealView study from the IAB – which used fish-eye lens cameras worn by survey participants to record and understand the true way people use their connected devices – on average it is up to 81 times a day. That’s once every six-and-a-half minutes.

No other screen demands (and, crucially, gets) that kind of attention. Why so? Because consumers now use their mobile devices as the primary means to control their communication, their work, their social life, their entertainment and their time.

Consequently, mobile is making waves in media and marketing, as seen by the 127 per cent increase in mobile ad spend in the first half of 2013 to £429.2m, according once again to the IAB. As awareness and understanding grow, brands are no longer asking ‘why?’ but ‘how?’ when it comes to determining their mobile strategy.

This paradigm shift is happening at lightning speed and is being driven by the growth of smartphones and tablets, improved connectivity and a thriving app industry. But it’s not enough to think about just the physical mobile device. If brands want to engage their customers successfully, then they need to think about the person on the end of each device: the user.

Know your audience

Thanks to the rich data generated by mobile, it is now easier than ever before for brands to think about their audiences. The data in mobile is different to that available from any other medium. It is collected in the real world, 24 hours a day. The ability to harness this data unlocks what is essentially the Holy Grail of advertising – providing relevant content to the right consumers, at the right place and time.

Various advertising mediums offer marketers different types of data and, depending on the channel, you will hear about social data, interest data, device data, demographic data, browsing data and more. Combined with perhaps the most important category of all, location data, real insights on behaviour can be derived for brands. 

Say for example you’re a large FMCG brand looking to target young professionals in the north of England. If you can see that a target consumer spends their weekends in Manchester and is in London for the rest of the week, you are able to deduce that they most likely work in the south
and are not to be targeted with content outside of the weekend.

Equally, a consumer on their morning commute will be interested in very different content to when they are out on a Friday night. We need to remember that what is relevant to audiences will change throughout the day. Brands need to connect with customers at moments that matter – expanding the benefits for customers and the results for brands.

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To engage customers successfully, brands need to think about the individual

Beyond location, consumers are also telling brands a great deal about themselves through the content that they curate for themselves. We all create our own unique portals of content, made up of the individual apps we choose to install on our devices – the vast majority of which are monetised by mobile advertising. These apps can tell us an enormous amount about the personality of the individual who installed them.

Another important aspect to consider with mobile data is that consumers are often in multiple audiences, and looking at the multi-audience view of a consumer provides a much more holistic look at who they actually are.

All this data can be overwhelming, even to the most digitally adept marketers. However, with the right measurement tools, brands can get very deep insights about what all of this means for very specific audience segments.

Closing the loop

Measurement is one of the most important issues in mobile advertising today. Brands need to feel confident that the money they are spending
in mobile advertising is truly moving the needle. As mobile is inherently different from all other advertising channels, this means that there are metrics out there that are only available in mobile.

For example, many consumers use their phones when they are away from home and on the move. If you are a retail brand, imagine being able
to run a campaign and then see metrics on the impact it made on physical foot traffic into your store, or on the total amount spent at a point of sale. With mobile, this is now possible.

Mobile campaigns have a wide range of different goals they are trying to achieve, and they are not just focused on direct response and driving commerce on the device. With the right type of tracking in place, it’s possible to show the impact that an advertisement had on a consumer, and
to tie everything together to provide a holistic view on the impact a single mobile ad made on the entire purchasing process.

Thanks to the power of location data, which lets us measure many things that were previously immeasurable, brands are now able to capitalise on a number of reliable measurement methodologies to help them understand ad effectiveness.

With these improvements in audience targeting and measurement, you can be sure that mobile as part of the wider marketing mix is only going to continue to grow in relevance and importance.

Stephen Jenkins
Marketing director EMEA
Millennial Media

22 Berners Street
London 
W1T 3DD

T: 020 7151 3331
E: sjenkins@millennialmedia.com
W: www.millennialmedia.com

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