Macking out on Mobile
Ran across "Five Mobile Trends for 2010" in AdAge, and two caught my eye:
- Advertising's outdoor real estate is fast becoming another
connected channel capable of delivering high-fidelity digital
experiences as unique, varied and measurable as more well-established
mediums. An example: Toyota's iPhone app that let users draw on the Thompson-Reuters screen in Times Square.
- Consumers have new power to express their opinions through
social technologies from anywhere, anytime. Smart marketers will do all
they can to encourage and act on this real-time feedback. Example: AT&T's iPhone app, Mark the Spot, which crowdsources areas of weak reception.
The "connective tissue" between these — and all the others on the list, actually — is interaction. That is, drawing consumers back in to the advertising itself, a medium that they've been trying desperately to tune out for years. Yes, you do occasionally see some appreciation for the form, like during the Super Bowl or annual retrospectives. But for the most part, people see ads as either too irrelevant (white noise) or too relevant, with frightening levels of intrusiveness.
So is it in fact time for the big reversal, enabled by mobile? Consumers taking back control, either by choosing which ads to receive (think mobile coupons) or actually contributing to the message by using their phones to instantly share thoughts about products, services, brands?
If that's the case, it'll be an interesting couple of years. The one warning I would issue is to make sure brands, publishers, and technology developers are not ignoring an important demographic: the slow adapters. Sure, it's great to enable all of this for the tech-savvy youth, for the gung-ho fans, for the Foursquare mayors. But if you don't make these new mediums accessible to the middle ground — those that will never be heavy users, will never be "obsessed," who don't read Mashable daily — you're going to miss out on the opportunity for widespread adoption. Easy come, easy go.
