Mobile and Technology

IN-DEPTH: Marketers need to be prepared to experiment with mobile marketing, and learn as they go along. One thing that’s extremely important is that companies implement some kind of tracking in any mobile-optimised site or application, recommends Tim Finn, head of EMEA at StrikeAd. Finn speaks about trends pertaining to mobile advertising in the travel sector.

By Ritesh Gupta

Advertisers now have the power to buy mobile ad space in real time and deliver ads instantly to specific areas, times and devices.

Link this with the rise in location-based advertising and marketers in the travel industry now have a much greater ability to target customers with ads which are directly relevant to them, at a very granular level.

The major trend in mobile advertising affecting the travel industry has to be Real-Time Bidding, says Tim Finn, head of EMEA at mobile advertising specialist StrikeAd.

According to Finn, it is also certainly the case that audience profiling is starting to come to Mobile which is a powerful addition to enabling travel organisations to target specific groups of people for airline bookings, holidays, hotels, car hire services etc.

Finn spoke to EyeforTravel.com’s Ritesh Gupta in detail about mobile advertising. Excerpts:

How do consumers engage with mobile devices today? How has this behaviour pushed the case for mobile advertising?

The mobile device is almost becoming the ‘travel computer’ of choice.

People have previously been nervous about using their mobile phones abroad whilst on holiday for fear of incurring high data download charges from their mobile operators. However, with the increased availability of wireless, they are able to learn more about where to go and book extra services whilst on holiday, opening up a wide gap in the market for travel marketers to target consumers. To back this up, our statistics at StrikeAd show a significant increase in the number of people accessing mobile internet from their mobile devices through WiFi, whether at home or on the go.

And we at StrikeAd can see a rise in travellers downloading relevant Apps before they travel as an easy way to pre-load content for their trips. According to Google, the number of mobile users researching travel via their mobile device in the US alone is expected to grow 51% in 2012. Add to this the increasing use of tablets, and there is a real opportunity for the travel industry here to target potential customers in market for travel services.

Can you list dos and don’ts when it comes to mobile advertising? How should travel marketers approach mobile advertising at this stage?

DO be prepared to experiment with mobile marketing, and learn as you go along. One thing that’s extremely important is that companies implement some kind of tracking in any mobile-optimised site or application. We are always amazed at how many companies forget this simple fact, but the ability to see exactly who and what is delivering the best return can be invaluable in your mobile marketing strategy. So, always look for a partner that can provide you with the right levels of tracking to understand and adapt your mobile marketing strategy.

DON'T come to mobile marketing with any pre-conceived ideas. It's important that you maintain an open mind when looking into any new marketing channel and adapt to the industry's unique features. There are so many opportunities as we have said with Real Time Bidding, location-based tracking, audience profiling and so on, that you can suddenly find advertising opportunities that are unavailable through traditional advertising channels. That said, it's also important that, whilst we've spoken about the ability to target your mobile advertising specifically for your audience, try not to target too tightly. By widening your target audience slightly, you can learn exactly where your results have come from and adapt your audience profiling to suit, and are, therefore, not limiting your campaign by potentially targeting too small an audience.

You recently mentioned that innovations in creative execution, audience targeting, tracking and reporting will help bring big brand dollars into the channel. Can you elaborate on this?

Right now, mobile advertising is being seen as a response-driven channel. However, with the increase in the use of rich media on mobile-optimised sites and apps, combined with effective audience targeting, companies can proactively push out brand awareness to their target audience. In this way advertisers can deliver effective rich interactive media and video ad campaigns to people out and about, thereby bringing bigger brand dollars into the channel.

Retail advertisers are already using mobile as a reach vehicle, indulging in cross-platform advertising and meeting their local marketing needs with mobile to reach out to new customers. Can you provide an insight into the trends pertaining to the travel sector?

The retail industry has been very sophisticated in providing mobile consumers with a complete mobile path – leading the customer through the entire process, even through to completing a transaction via their mobile site.

The travel sector needs to think of the mobile channel as an end-to-end solution on a smaller screen and design their transactional and awareness capabilities accordingly. A mobile-optimised site is essential to enabling customers to complete their transaction via their mobile device.

The ability for existing customers to compare flights and hotel prices and book on their mobile device whilst in a travel mindset, perhaps seven sitting in their living room watching TV, introduces a completely new way of booking a holiday.

Travel companies should also use this channel as an opportunity for re-marketing to existing customers – they should eliminate a lengthy sign-in process by enabling the consumer to set up an automatic log-in on their mobile device, and this way attract loyalty and repeat bookings from their customer base.

Today, with the number of applications being used that have location enabled advertising, the opportunities for brands to interact with consumers have increased. How do you assess the current perception about the efficacy of location enabled advertising?

I'd even go so far as to say that location-based advertising is the killer app of mobile advertising and a key differentiator from conventional digital channels. In our experience at StrikeAd, location-based advertising is extremely effective. Just look at eBay's recent acquisition of location-based media and advertising company Where. They certainly believe that there is a market shift towards this kind of targeting by location.

On the PC you can target someone sat at home or in the office, but on a mobile device you can target the right person at the right time, who has the right intent and is in the place you want them to be. This is the holy grail for advertisers and mobile advertising is set apart as an extremely effective method of targeting consumers with right time, right place messages.

Recently, an executive told me: Mobile ads that tap into social interests, demographic, and time targeting, answer an immediate need for consumers. Based on this need, we are going to see a rise in social-geo targeting technology that accesses demographic data based on publically-available social media activity data to better target consumers. How do you assess the situation?

I agree – we will most definitely see a rise in social-geo targeting in 2012. By accessing the data which is based on publically-available social media activity, companies can target potential customers much more effectively.

For example, StrikeAd has worked with Place IQ in the past, which uses social media data to better understand the location of consumers, in order to target them with the most appropriate ads to their location and activity. By giving context to the consumers' location through social media, and applying it through a mobile ad-buying platform like StrikeAd's Fusion, advertisers can make sense of all this data to be able to target those users best.

What sort of benchmarks can one set for assessing the success of such initiatives at this stage?

One of the main benchmarks which advertisers need to look at is to try and assess how much traffic already goes to their website from a mobile device. It may be that 10-20 percent of your audience are already accessing your traditional web site through a mobile device and could benefit from a better experience through a mobile-optimised site. The uplift in transactions through the mobile-optimised experience can then be measured against your benchmark.

However, ultimately, mobile advertising is not rocket science. The medium may be new but the measurement of success is the same.

So all of the traditional ROI benchmarks still apply such as spend measured by number of downloads, mobile site traffic interactions, new channel revenue, video-views, increased traffic throughput etc.