Google’s Jason Spero, up there with Mary Meeker as a “must-hear” speaker on mobile activity and where we are headed, recently chided the industry for focusing so much on app installs.
He also said that while a brand that sees 5-7% of its customers being reached by mobile is labeled a success, there is an opportunity for much more if marketers would give consumers more ways to “take action”.
“My fear is that we as an industry have over-indexed on app installs as the goal, when what we need to focus on is the mobile consumer who wants to solve real-world problems like booking a flight or buying makeup,” Spero, Google's VP of Performance Media, said in a keynote at the M1 Summit in San Francisco.
“There is so much revenue to be made for an app install, but it's a very small part of what is going on for consumers in mobile. It’s about recognizing that moment and recognizing what they want and need in that moment”.
Spero (@speroman) pointed to what he called ”fundamental consumer behavior changes”, adding that they are “planning, researching, buying and finding on mobile.
“Think about how you serve broader action on mobile.”
Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, often comments on the disparity between consumer time spent on mobile and marketing dollars that go to the channel. More money surely will come when outcomes can be identified, affected, and tracked.
Some companies that Spero mentioned that are seeing success:
- Progressive, which has begun to do predictive rendering that takes into account an individual’s history. For example, if a consumer has filed an insurance claim, that information gets prominent placement when the brand is reached on a mobile device.
- 1-800 Contacts, a company that has simplified it form fill to make it easy to get a new supply of contact lens, and an app that solves a pain point by enabling a consumer to process an order by taking and uploading a picture of a prescription.
He named satisfaction, dreaming, and motivation as reasons that we all use mobile and said that as an industry, "we are just now grasping the opportunity".
Among other comments that caught my attention at the conference:
- During a panel on CRM, there was considerable talk about personalization and the so-called “creepy” factor where mobile users feel that their privacy is invaded. The definition of creepy was all over the board, including this one from Appboy CEO Mark Ghermezian -- “Customers are expecting personalization. If you’re not personalizing and telling them what they want to hear, that’s when you are creeping them out.” That, in my opinion, is case dependent. For instance, we don’t want a brand knowing that we are at the dentist, nor do we want a company to send us an offer when we’re in the chair. That, to most, is TMI and out of bounds.
- Bill Gross, the founder and CEO of Idealab, said that mobile will be bigger than keyword advertising. "The smartphone is the biggest disruption to retail since the automobile, and it's just getting started."
(first posted on imediaconnection.com - http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2014/11/16/are-you-successful-if-5-7-of-your-customers-engage-through-mobile/)
