I recently attended MMA's SM2 event in New York and was impressed by the amount of energy at the the event. I captured some thoughts on the flight back home to Dublin of some of the headline points I picked up on.
- Currently mobile accounts for something like 30% of web traffic but only 3% of ad spend so there is going to be a lot of growth in mobile advertising.
- Mobile used to be called the third screen (after TV and PC), now it is really the first screen. Mobile is now the hub that binds all of the online experiences together because it is always with you. Mobile has also changed what watching TV means due to activities such as co-browsing.
- Nielsen is planning to incorporate mobile views of shows into their ratings system (e.g. Netflix).
- Mobile drives 16% of all of Macy's revenue. They are seeing 4x mobile traffic this year compared with same time last year.
There was some interesting feedback from brands on what works and doesnt work on mobile. Macy's said that QR codes don't work for them. The requirement to get a third party app to read them more or less kills them. Despite the fact the people really like apps the mobile web is a really important discovery platform.
Google mentioned a write once, run anywhere web design tool which duly arrived last week. Its called the Google Web Designer app. I tried it out yesterday. It's very much focused on prototyping HTML5 ads leveraging capability to do animations and transitions. Google appear to have picked this up when they acquired Motorola.
Overall, there was a general consensus that mobile advertising is in its infancy and shows tremendous promise.