Nothing will stop mobile’s growth, says Rob Griffin of Havas Media, but its fragmented infrastructure poses some speed bumps
Editor’s note: “Mobile Matters” is our ongoing series that features advertising industry leaders sounding off on the top issues, challenges and opportunities in the fast-moving world of mobile marketing.
In this week’s edition of “Mobile Matters” we hear from Rob Griffin, Executive Vice President and Global Director of Digital Product Development for Havas Media, who tackled the question: If you could solve one key mobile marketing challenge, what would it be, and how would you do it?
The key challenge facing mobile marketers today is easier to identify than it is to resolve. I’m talking about the fragmented mobile infrastructure. I’d like to somehow reinvent the existing infrastructure to allow more efficient creative and better tracking.
This is indeed a key challenge. The mobile landscape is so fragmented that marketers often hit the same users across their iPhones, iPads, Kindles, and all the new little laptops that you could say are mobile, too. Current tracking capabilities don’t allow marketers to do much about that. Tracking is so limited that marketers often just take a leap of faith on their mobile campaigns. They know mobile is big and they have to be in it, but they’re worried about not having the ammo to show their clients how these campaigns are doing.
We need to rethink how mobile operates. We need to make it look more like the traditional Web experience that we’ve all grown up with and learned to love, where it doesn’t matter if you’re on a Macbook, HP or Dell, where creative sizes are standardized, video is video, rich media is rich media, and the platforms that we use to track and target and deliver our campaigns work for the most part across all of these, with a few exceptions. In mobile, we’re not close to that yet.
That’s why you see companies like Medialets popping up, who are trying to learn from the traditional Web and create a platform that’s plugged directly into mobile inventory with premium publishers, so marketers can create content and assets for their clients that actually have some degree of scalability.
This challenge ripples across all aspects of mobile marketing. From a buying perspective, the fragmentation is so great that we’re seeing mobile inventory leapfrogging the ad network model that the terrestrial Web-based world lived with for years and going right to programmatic buying and RTB. The goal is to somehow provide scale in the mobile world.
And we’re still too limited in what we can track and how we can track it, even something as basic as identifying what is mobile traffic and what is traditional Web-based traffic. Too many times, we’re potentially hitting the same ad against the same user multiple times. I think that’s part of the reason why it’s been the “year of mobile” for the past decade.
The good news is, there’s so much interest and growth and potential in mobile right now, this problem will be solved because it has to be. The market will demand it.
