I have Antoine RJ Wright to thank for the inspiration for this post. He has just retweeted a comment by Andrew Grill suggesting that “ …there are no challenges in mobile, just sites not yet mobile optimised!”
Now I am assuming that what Andrew is suggesting here is the sites in question are web sites. Therefore the challenge ahead for advertisers and marketers is to mobilize the web.
The problem with this of course is if we limit our imagination to the future of mobile marketing being little more than optimising our web sites for the 1000+ mobile devices out there then all we will be doing is adding to our collective costs of doing business.
However if Andrew is suggesting the challenge is the make the site (i.e. the location) mobile optimised then I wholeheartedly agree with his assessment.
I say this because I know that by reading Andrew’s blog he has long been a fan of Jonathon McDonald’s 3 P’s of Mobile and Social Marketing but something of a QR code skeptic.
You see if we simply believe that the mobile challenge is to mobilise the web then we will fundamentally miss what make mobile media so unique and more importantly so exciting for the future of marketing.
If you are in the business of manufacturing handsets then you need your customers walking into a crowded room and saying “Hey! You just gotta take a look at this”. If they are not doing this today then you need to urgently rethink the mobile experience.
Likewise if you are in the business of advertising and marketing and your audience isn’t interacting with your campaign and thinking I really need to share this… then you need to urgently rethink your mobile experience.
You see if we embrace the challenge of making the location (be it the store, the bus stop, the tube station, the billboard or the coffee cup) a mobile experience then the so-called barriers to mobile advertising (i.e. Permission, Preference and Privacy) actually become the gateway to delivering a significantly improved customer relationship. If the customer uses their phone to scan a QR code or a Barcode, tap an NFC device or interact with the location using Augmented Reality (e.g. Google Goggles) then the customer has acted on those 3 P’s.
As this video courtesy of Designboom clearly illustrates if you are not thinking of the mobile phone as a revolutionary global local mobile direct response marketing channel then you have totally misread what the mobile web and mobile apps revolution is going to be all about.
As you can see in the video UX Design for the mobile phone becomes a lot more exciting when you start thinking outside the small screen and begin embracing the simple idea that the mobile phone is the “game controller” that allows you to navigate in between the real and the digital world.
The web was all about creating destinations that utilised content as a hook. Mobile is all about creating experiences that incorporate the mobile phone as the game controller.
As I have said before, a day spent with a leading fashion retailer in the future will be more like a day spent at Disneyland. Fashion shopping will become a social gaming experience and the mobile phone will play an integral part in shaping that experience.
The future of mobile marketing is all about getting your customers excited enough to use their mobile phone to engage with you in as many ways as you can think of… and that’s what makes mobile marketing so much more challenging than just delivering yet another iteration of your website or Facebook page.
ARJWright
July 9, 2011
Nice to see someone take that statement and run with it. I’m still mulling the direction that I wanted to chat on that quote/tweet.
A common analogy that I use for mobile, specifically to folks who don’t think of mobile or what’s possible with it besides apps, calls, and texts, is that of Mickey Mouse’s wand in Fantasia. With that wand (and some discipline) he could create his own world, a world that was always interactive in ways that only exist in his mind. That analogy usually brings smiles, and then concern that folks aren’t taking advantage of what they’ve invested into.
Andrew’s comment was taken from a tweet where he congratulated a person on becoming a mobile director at an LBS company. To that genre, anything that isn’t mobile-optimized *and* offers a palatable selling point, isn’t an opportunity. Its an opportunity, but as you illustrate, isn’t one that takes advantage of mobile.
Personally, I geek/long for more people to go mobile like you describe. I fear though that people – at least those whom are enabled – don’t know how to imagine anymore. And what’s lost there becomes just iterations on top of what didn’t work as well before. We need more Mickey’s with magic wands inventing and helping others to create. If LBS, or anything else mobile-optimized can do that, then we’ve got something.