Shoot down your marketing objectives with rich media mobile advertising -Seungyeon Kim (General Mana

Seungyeon Kim, General Manager of InMobi Korea, commented on the mobile marketing trend and was quoted in DBR (Dong-A Business Review) magazine, published on August 2nd.

Future Mobile Marketing Trend: 4 Keywords

Korea has gone all mobile during the last three years. It reached more than a +50% smartphone penetration with +20% connected to 4G LTE. Korea is the 2nd largest mobile market in Asia, outside of Japan. Everyone is convinced that mobile will be the next big thing, but no one is able to discuss exactly how it will be different. Here, I aim to explain this using four big keywords that will cover four corners of mobile media.

(1) Mobile Rich Media  - Reinventing your consumer’s brand experience

Rich media is developed to contain a wide range of content, filled with rich information. One of the unique strong points of rich media is that it can be expanded on the same page with videos, sound, and pictures. Users can be allowed to transform creative forms and images. For example, if a user touches the screen of their smartphone, a product in the ad can be changed to a dynamic 3D image with multimedia effects. This effect can give users a dramatic experience, without being direct to another page. Users can go back to the web page or the app where they were in the first place. Samsung Electronics executed a 3D mobile rich media advertisement during a global marketing campaign for the GalaxyS2. Generally, rich media can obtain click-through-rates (CTR) that are 4x the average CTR of a banner ad. The Samsung 3D Rich Media Ad campaign reached a CTR that is 10x that of a normal banner ad.

(2) Consumer Insight: Having 1:1 with your own and prospective customers

Marketers invest a great deal of time trying to understand consumers’ minds. Traditional marketing activity offers data that can enable them to know how effectively messages were delivered. However it is limited in knowing the degree of consumer reaction to the message. This is a significantly important part in marketing activity. With mobile advertisements, however, marketers can get a detailed picture of consumer preferences. Thus, using the interaction of mobile advertisements can help get marketing insight that makes it easy for marketers to predict consumer reaction as well as demand that can be applied to marketing activity. For example, rich media that shows a virtual show room where users can choose the color of a car can show marketers which exact color was preferred overall. This information and insight can be very important for marketers as well as for knowing and predicting color preference. Furthermore, this type of information is meaningful data when predicting sales and inventory allocation.

(3) Super Targeting: Not only deciding where your ads will show but defining to whom it will show to

In mobile marketing, targeting those that can reach adequate users is an important matter. Traditionally, marketing activity had to find places and media where consumers were present. This was not very effective. But with online marketing, such as keyword advertising, customers who searched for a certain keyword were led to certain ads. In this way, however, we still cannot know consumer behavior entirely.

However, more sophisticated targeting can be possible with mobile. With the information provided by mobile devices, targeting can be optimized. App advertisements (the biggest part of mobile ads) can be optimized by conditions and by the information from the smartphone such as device information, operator, operating system, gender, region, time, site, demography and so on. But mobile device super targeting does come with privacy issues, so it should be treated carefully.

(4) Social Mobile: Mobile ad network amplified by social connections

By using smartphones, consumers can easily access SNS with mobile web and apps.  For instance, half of Facebook users access Facebook through their mobile device.  Social marketing is a trend because it expands fast, and feedback is quick, but it still needs accurate analysis tools and guidelines. It can still be hard to know the exact accounted number of the effect and consumer needs. To overcome this difficulty, combination with SNS and mobile will be a great alternative.

Social networks reflect the paradigm shift of consumer behavior, and the accessibility and influence of SNS are integrated to a maximum degree by mobile. Marketers should take mobile marketing environments into account continuously. From the point of traditional mass media, more personalized media is becoming preferred, and users will be exposed to advertisements by their smartphones. If markets want their customers to be exposed to more differentiated experiences, mobile can be a solution. Now, companies should consider how quickly and properly they can gauge consumer preferences, and offer unique brand advertisements.

Now is the era that mobile is becoming a core platform for marketing and advertising.