BARCELONA — Brands have had long enough to adapt to the reality of modern media – consumer are all over mobile. So why are so many getting it so wrong?
When IPG’s mobile and technology agency Ansible worked with survey group YouGov to produce an index ranking brands’ effectiveness at mobile presentation, some of the figures shocked global CEO Travis Johnson.
The index examined 2,000 brands in 15 countries against 60 criteria, generating some 240,000 data points.
“The entire score was out of 130 – there are some brands in the US and around the world that were getting 10s and 20s,” Johnson tells Beet.TV in this video interview during Mobile World Congress.
“Indeed, the highest telco scored about 120 out of 130; the lowest one scored about 20. This is their business – to be good at mobile – and they don’t even have their apps and actual mobile presence sorted. There’s lots of room for improvement across every category.”
Ansible was formed in 2007, acquired the UK’s Mubaloo last year and recently rolled out in India. It is the division that makes mobile experiences for IPG brands.
At Mobile World Congress, WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell told Beet.TV mobile technology still wasn’t attractive enough to make it a truly engaging ad medium, while P&G marketing VP Sophie Blum said the small screen was a challenge.
Furthermore, Bank Of America enterprise media planning, investment and measurement SVP Lou Paskalis told us marketers should stop jamming one-to-many advertising in to what is actually a one-to-one channel experience.
It is, by now, well known that, whilst consumers spend a large amount of their overall time with their smartphones, advertisers’ spend does not meet the same proportion.
On the desktop, advertisers have faced the necessity to clean up their presentation and not to over-burden consumers. And Ansible’s Johnson says they need to do the same on mobile, to ensure a discoverable, usable site.
“Google says, if a page doesn’t load in three seconds, people will reject it and go back to a competitors’ site,” he says. “The average of all the brands we surveyed was 10 seconds.
“Over half the world’s traffic is now in mobile – but we’ve still got brands that are just not embracing it.”
So he says it is now time to stop optimising the mere targeting of advertising, which has already been effectively tackled, and to focus on the delivery environment instead.
This video was produced in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress 2017. The series is sponsored by Turner. Please visit this page for additional segments from MWC.