The rise in mobile communications signals a change in marketing that is more significant than a shift in channels. It represents a profound reconsideration in how to think about effective targeting. The principles that drive the prevailing wisdom on targeting are based on the historical move from mass advertising to direct marketing. Mass advertising provided a low CPM, but for most marketers it involved a good deal of waste. With TV, radio and print, in order to capture the people you really wanted, you had to expose your message to a larger audience of people you didn’t want. You could reduce that somewhat by seeking out narrower audiences in niche programs or titles, but it was still casting a wide net.
The promise of direct marketing was that you could deliver your communications only to the people you really wanted to reach. If you wanted affluent Moms in households with kids under 12, that’s all you had to buy. The higher CPMs that came with this approach were justified by the efficiency and higher response rates. There was a shift from seeking out as many people as possible to seeking out only the people that mattered. It was a shift from focusing on “Places that Matter” to “People That Matter.”
The arrival of digital performance marketing took the principle of “People that Matter” to an even higher degree of precision. You could go beyond demographics and customer data in targeting, and include even finer distinctions revealed by online behavior. Now you could target Moms in affluent households with kids under 12, who seek out photography tips, love Gwen Stefani videos, and visited your website two days ago. At first, Mobile seemed like an opportunity to take that specificity even further. But as the nature of mobile usage evolved, it turns out a difference in degree became a difference in kind.
Mobile shifts targeting from a focus on “People that Matter” to a focus on “Moments that Matter.” Digital media maven Dave Marsey coined that phrase to signal the new challenges and opportunities Mobile provides beyond more precise targeting of individuals. Both the explicit and implicit data around Mobile allows marketers to market to the situation rather than just a person. For many brands, the moment is more important than the person. If you are in the QSR business, for example, would you rather connect with someone in the heart of your demographic target, or with someone stepping out of work for lunch at 11:50am within a walking distance of one of your restaurants? The first choice is a person that matters, the second is a moment that matters. Ideally, you’d want both, but the power of knowing the context of the moment has the potential to trump what you know about the person.
Yet the advantage of knowing the moment is only useful if you manage to it. People generally use mobile with more intent than traditional media, and marketers will be successful to the extent that they are seen as relevant to that intent. Relevance used to be defined in terms of what you said. In the mobile ecosystem, relevance is what you provide. In the QSR example, the lunch-seeking office worker is focused on what to eat. So she’s more interested in a new menu item and much less in a concert promotion. The situation would be reversed when that same worker is headed home chilling out with Pandora. That’s why the argument about the screen size of mobile devices and such miss the point. Mobile marketing is not about how to stand out on a screen, but how to provide people with value in that moment. Value can take many forms: education, entertainment, shopping, etc. Taking full advantage of Moments that Matters doesn’t require more pixels; it requires more thought.
The Ryan Report 