Back in 2007 and 2008 when the iOS and Android smartphone platforms were still in their infancy, it became clear that something really big was about to happen. Soon everyone would be carrying supercomputers in their pockets at all times, and that was going to change the world in profound ways.
And it did: we now have every major communication channel (talk, text, video conference, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.) available to us 24/7. Our map apps have eliminated the need for their paper counterparts, and we can’t get lost anymore. We have a large fraction of all human knowledge at our fingertips whenever we want it. We can even tap-and-pay using our phones. All of this is nothing short of amazing and for most of us life without these portable digital miracles seems unimaginable. However, there’s one area where the smartphone revolution has made remarkably little progress: advertising.
“Mobile advertising really sucks.” — Steve Jobs, April 2010
Steve Jobs had a point that’s still valid more than seven years later. Mobile advertising hasn’t progressed in any meaningful way since Jobs made this declaration. Why? Because so-called “mobile advertising” really isn’t mobile at all. There isn’t anything mobile going on in the banner ad at the top of your Minecraft game. Banner ads are an old Web 1.0 technology that takes us back to the worst of digital advertising, circa 1998. Someone tricked us into calling this mobile advertising, and for whatever reason, nobody ever noticed and banner ads are still used today.
The problem is that mobile advertisers have completely failed to take advantage of our smartphones’ sensors. Nobody has been able to figure out how to leverage the physicality and portability of a smartphone to create a new ad format that moves us beyond the Web 1.0 era. Our mobile hardware has continued to make progress, but our adtech comes from a legacy generation tied closely to the World Wide Web (WWW).
That’s all about to change in a big way. We’re currently seeing a great deal of innovation aimed at merging the physical and digital worlds, as emphasized by our Real World Web (RWW) platform. We’re pushing the Internet out into the real world and making the whole world digitally interactive so that people can use the technology around them all the time. One area ripe for disruption by the Real World Web is mobile customer engagement — we actually prefer this term to ‘advertising’ because the new things that are possible are so much more sophisticated than the 1-dimensional ads of yesterday.
The RWW is on the cusp of completely changing the nature of mobile marketing tech, and we’re about to finally see a truly mobile ad format break away from the WWW. What is this going to look like? We’ve seen some hints of it. For instance, consider the Pokemon Go game, which first launched in mid-2016. The developers behind Pokemon Go discovered that if you put a PokeStop on the sidewalk in front of a pizzeria, it drives foot traffic to the restaurant, and all of a sudden business is booming. This is vastly more authentic than traditional ads and far more relevant to Millennial audiences, who grew up with video game controllers in their hands.
You can put up a billboard or pay for a banner ad telling people to go to the pizzeria, and virtually nobody will even notice the ads, let alone obey them, and walk from point A to point B, because it’s distracting, intrusive and spammy. But if you create a really cool game that drives passionate engagement, then as a pure side effect of playing it, you can incentivize valuable customer behavior without making the recipient feel like they’re being targeted by advertising in the first place. Instead, they’re having fun and getting something valuable in exchange for their actions.
The whole industry will soon move away from spammy banners and pop-ups toward high-quality experiential advertising that’s far better and more engaging than traditional ads. In this vision of the future, there will be no such thing as non-digital advertising. We’ll use these sensors to upgrade ALL traditional advertising channels to become digital, interactive, and measurable.
Xperiel is bringing that new vision to life via experiential marketing 2.0. We’re able to put digital triggers onto all of our T.V., print, and billboard channels to unify them into a single system. This is the ultimate expression of cross-channel marketing, and the common denominator is our mobile devices. Advertising will quickly become more valuable to consumers because when you engage with these channels, you’ll get something in return. It might be a discount that’s saved to your phone, or a free service, a digital download such as a song, or an extra power-up in a digital game. All of this will be targeted, so two people interacting with the same T.V. ad during the Super Bowl may receive completely different rewards. The important concept here is interactivity. Traditional ad formats are a one-way street, and you can’t interact with them. This next generation of engagement technology is bidirectional and interactive, which is precisely what modern consumers have come to expect, having grown up during the video game era.
Experiential marketing has always existed, but it’s more or less been a one-size-fits-all proposition. It has always been the best, most creative and engaging ad format, but it’s also been the most expensive and the hardest to scale. Both of these problems will soon be solved and we’re going to see these creative and engaging campaigns run at scale for a fraction of today’s costs.
Finally, because all marketing channels will be digital, they’ll become measurable and we will at last be able to close the offline attribution loop between online advertising and physical activity. We’ll be able to track a customer’s journey through a brand’s marketing empire from T.V. to print to the sponsored music festival, and then to the cash register in order to calculate attribution just like we do online today.
With the help of our RWW, this is what big-brand advertising is going to look like in a fully interactive world where the physical and digital have merged. Our smartphones should have revolutionized advertising many years ago, but the day is fast approaching when they will finally fulfill their great promise.
