By Adam Wakefield
This idea, and a number of others, arose during a panel discussion at the
Mobile Marketing Association SA Forum, held during
Loeries Creative Week in Durban in August.
Understanding the landscape
The panel featured Facebook Africa regional head and client partner, Aidan Baigrie; InMobi head of sales for Middle East, Turkey and Africa Andy Powell; and Africa head of sales at Opera Mediaworks EMEA, Andrew Kramer, with Liquorice Africa founder and CEO, Miles Murphy, guiding the discussion.
Arguably, the most pointed thread during the discussion was towards its end, when the panellists were asked how CMOs in South Africa’s still pro-traditional channel market can be convinced to invest in mobile.
Kramer said that, historically, clients over-spend on TV “but because no one gets fired for buying too much TV, the habit just continues”.
For mobile to get into the picture, Kramer believes it is about building a story around mainstream media, and seeing how mobile can give value to the media share and then put forward compelling reasons why clients should move more of their resources into mobile.
Balgrie had two points on the matter, the first being that changing perceptions around mobile meant not necessarily substituting television, but augmenting it.
“It’s about the channels working together, it’s not us and them,” he said.
“The second thing for me, we need to understand traditional media.”
It amazes Balgrie how little traditional media knowledge exists in the digital space.
“I think for us to be taken seriously as digital mobile marketers, we need to put in those hours of learning and understand how the decisions are being made, because until we understand what’s driving those decisions, again we’re just playing in our own little bucket,” he said.
Not being that shiny toy anymore
Earlier, at the beginning of the discussion, Murphy asked the panellists to give an opening thought.
Balgrie wanted to see a more traditional discussion of mobile as an established marketing channel, instead of being seen as this “shiny” tool.
You can put all the “shiny things on” but when push comes to shove, the challenge is how digital marketing is perceived compared to its peers.
“We can see that in South Africa, where digital is still something generally optional and not seen as a core path where we reach people,” he said.
This lack of understanding of what digital is often sees the digital function assigned to a 19-year-old with a laptop inside of the business.
How the industry measures itself also poses a problem. It did not surprise Balgrie that there existed a wariness among ad decision makers to target mobile because the means by which the industry measured itself keeps changing.
Powell followed, telling the forum attendees that mobile sometimes is unnecessarily over complicated.
“You just tend to find all these different buzz words all the time. It really isn’t as complicated as you find,” he said.
What has worked for InMobi is the creative opportunities presented by mobile, and “that has always been the new hook”.
Mobile provides a lot more data than other platforms, and what they give to their clients is the creativity, coupled with data, while not being unnecessarily complicated.
Two trends Powell pointed to regarding mobile is the increasing importance of video, calling 2016 “the year of video within mobile”, with the other trend being native content.
“We see literally daily updates on apps re-developing the way their content flows to get native ads in there. I think video and native are the way forward,” Powell said.
It was then Kramer’s turn, who emphasised the “exceptional creative opportunity” mobile provides but what is incredibly important to recognise is creativity is not being deployed with scale.
If you are not deploying at scale, “we’re just wasting the client’s money and our time”. Up until now, with digital being that “shiny new space”, clients have the perception that digital is a channel where they can make amazing gains with relatively modest investment.
“As media owners, we need to be a bit more honest with clients,” Kramer said. “There is scale in mobile. Put together the creative content that will resonate with the user based on the marketing insight, and then the sky is the limit.”