Smartphone ad revolution

Smartphone penetration in the Middle East is expected to rise to 28.8 per cent of total handset sales by 2015, a recent ValuePartners report says. This rapid growth spells an opportunity for companies to drive hyper-targeted, brand and product influence and awareness campaigns.

For consumers it eventually means more relevant content directed their way rather than the erstwhile ‘scatter gun’ approach, replacing quantity with quality. This opportunity can be leveraged in different ways across shared, earned, owned or paid communication platforms.

On the earned and shared side, the way viral content spreads on mobiles has been transformed with the arrival of larger phone screens, faster processors and downloads with first 3G and now 4G. Further feeding this development is the fact that cameras, phones and tablets all now feature quick upload buttons to content sharing and social networking sites.

A recent Nielsen Global online survey found 43 per cent of Middle East respondents were likely to access the internet over a mobile phone, 29 per cent on a handheld multimedia device and 24 per cent over an in-home video game system. In another manifestation of the changing nature of influence leveraged through paid platforms, the research, which focused on mobile advertising trends in the Middle East between July and October 2010, discovered that mobile ad impressions in the region grew 51 per cent to 752 million monthly impressions. Smartphones were used by 40 per cent of those to view those ads.

While smartphones can only be said to be yet another delivery mechanism for internet content, their form factor and convergence capabilities take them to a completely different level of consumer profiling and targeting possibilities. As shared, earned, paid and owned platforms converge, in the perfect world, what the consumer experiences on his smartphone would closely match with what he wants to.

He would even be able to use customised filters and preferences to proactively tailor this experience. This is in stark comparison to where a lot of marketing moolah is scattered to the winds as viewers channel surf during commercial breaks or miss relevant editorial because it isn’t on their ‘usual pages’ to browse through. Enter the dragon of marketing and promotion through influence not intrusion!

— The writer is Managing Director, India, Waggener Edstorm Worldwide. She is a seasoned communications strategist consulting across sectors using the company’s bespoke Integrated Influence model.