To really take off…mobile marketing will
have to:
1. Prove its effectiveness to the
advertiser and utility to the consumer
2. Prove its emotionality as an
experience
How do you feel?
1

This house resolves
“To really take off, Mobile needs to be
more about passion than utility”
Mark Linder, WPP
22 April 2009, Prague
European Mobile Media Conference
2

“I have been in the advertising business for
25 years.
And I have never met a client who wanted
advertising…
3

“But they all wanted to sell something”
-- Antti Ohrling, co-founder of Blyk
4

What made advertising really take off
was passion
5

Client passion, agency passion, an infusion of talent,
visibility in the press – all of it.
And does it all really work?
6

Advertising also gave us a way of seeing the
world which is passion-less
7

That way of thinking undermines our ability to
understand people as individuals
8

Why? Because advertising is unilateral
Brand
Target Target
Target
9

Rosser Reeves, coined
“Unique Selling Proposition”
Advertising is more about
science and research than
\"arts and crafts\"
10

USP Influence
“….traditionally, marketing is done to people,
not for or with them. Messages are developed
and broadcast to ostensibly passive and
receptive audiences.
If they don’t respond, then there are “compliance
issues” or “problems of communications uptake.”
--Jill Caldwell, a social researcher
11

My view of you.
My interest in your business.
My message in your paper.
My USP.
12

Relationships are
not unilateral
Who wrote it?
Mystery advertisement with a
target audience of one
13

This is why advertising isn’t generally
interesting
Written by somebody else,
for everybody else
14

15

Death of advertising?
“The sky is falling, the frog in the pot has come to a
boil and, oh yeah, we are, most of us, exquisitely,
irretrievably fucked.”
• -- Bob Garfield, Advertising Age
16

Advertising also gave us wrong ideas about
branding
17

Advertising taught us that a brand is the
way we label a selling approach
18

Buy my demonstration?
Buy my brand.
19

Like my humor?
Like my brand.
20

Want my idea?
Want my brand.
21

“The Brand” became a label
for a selling idea
22

And then there’s “the consumer”
With appreciation for David Kenning of
Bell-Pottinger Sans Frontières
23

“The consumer” is a target ,
and information is restricted to what sells
• One objective – sell you more
24

No….we still spend a lot of time with television
But as an outlook, does it help us with mobile?
25

What if we said goodbye to our ways
of marketing and started over?
26

Said goodbye to “marketing” where
the only goal is a sale
27

Said goodbye to the “consumer”, as though
their only purpose is to be there while we
convince them the product they bought a
year ago is obsolete
28

Said goodbye to any un-natural means
of paying for attention…
29

What would we do, as mobile
developers and marketers?

We would replace the word “consumer”
with “people”
With appreciation for Robert Deutch
31

We would be taking a multi-lateral view,
aware of people, and how they relate
Near
Near Inner
Inner Inner
Cause
or
Near
brand Near
Inner Inner
Near Near
Inner
Near
Near
Near
Near Near Outer
Outer
Outer
Outer
32

99 out of 100 people are amazingly
interesting.
And the one who isn’t, is more interesting,
because he or she is 1/100
33

We would really get into the “people” who
use our products and services
34

Heck, we would even think of
marketing
as a service for those people
35

We would think of “marketing” as a value-exchange
that makes people’s lives better
We would think of “sales” as the value exchange
where money changes hands
36

An act of kindness is always re-paid
37

We would also understand there is a bit of a
backlash against commercial marketing
38

Google goes behind the red curtain
Google is offering free downloads of licensed music tracks
in China. …
Research showed 84 per cent of people in China used
search engines to find music. Rival search engines in
China point users to unlicensed music, which reportedly
makes up 99 per cent of all tracks distributed in
China….The move by Google will open up a catalogue of
more than 350,000 songs from Sony, Warner, EMI and
Universal, to its Chinese users….
39

Shanzhai culture is a
rebellion against monopoly
sectors. Shanzhai shows the
desire by poor people for a
better life and fashionable
things
Real Chinese iPhone
40

There’s a little Shanzhai in all of us…
41

Consumers in all countries, notably the Nordics, France,
China – believe content should be as close to zero cost
as possible
100% of people under 54 have downloaded file-shared
content
71% think file sharing is wrong
72% feel that file sharing should be regulated
However, with the exception of the 54+’s, nobody thinks
regulating the internet works
Bell-Pottinger
internal study
42

(What, exactly, is the business model for
pirates?)
With appreciation for Paul Bell and David Kenning,
Bell-Pottinger Sans Frontières
43

Could it be more psychological than practical?
44

Could it be about the asymmetric challenge?
Bringing down the established order…. with
no real thought of what replaces it
45

Like these guys?
(now there’s a brand…)
46

“What are you rebelling
against?”
“What have you got?”
The Wild Ones
47

Be for something
Be someone
Which is more
Let’s talk about passion passionate?
Be against something
48

We would remember real people are on a confusing
journey called life.
What can we offer them on this journey?
49

We could offer them a different idea of “brand”
50

A 'brand' is actually a primal and primary
mechanism of the mind.
It is attachment, a merging between a
person's 'self story' and a person's story of
you, the product, the company.”
Dr. Robert Deutch
51

We get attached
to dogs, cars, people
and, yes, brands
The real way --
person has a story
The brand has a story
Person gets attached to brand story
52

People want brands
“that are like me”
“that like me”
“that are more than me”
53

If the your brand has that kind of power (to
be “more like me”), then you can offer
people a chance to be more of themselves
54

The attachment to a brand should be a yellow brick
road through life, a journey made together in which
both parties help fill out each other’s latent
possibilities
What better place to play, than mobile?
55

So, how should we feel differently
about mobile marketing?
56

We throw out the purchase funnel…
• Mobile marketers know the purchase funnel
is not a representation of the way people
really are
57

We remember life isn’t a straight line
Graphic from
Forrester research
58
Apreciation for Arto Joensuu, Nokia

Real people are in the search for feeling…
so we give them that
59

Remember what falling in love is like?
60

Can you fall in love with a level?
61

Give people something to fall in love with
iHandy Level
• Cost of download: Free
• iTunes Rating: * * *
• Released: 2008-12-22
62
With appreciation for Todd Tran, Joule

We can (need to) fall in love in many little ways to
keep life interesting
We can fall in love with a new bread, a new car, a
new device, a new service.
We transfer emotion to all these objects because
they represent something that speaks to our sense
of self
63

We want to desire, and we want to be the object of
desire
Mobile should not be afraid of being intoxicated by
passion
64

Top applications – appeal to passion!
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Relationship
Entertainment
Entertainment
Relationship
Utility
Entertainment
Entertainment
Relationship
Utility
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment
65

People want to believe they are in the act of
becoming.
The brand (the company) needs to be always in the
act of becoming.
66

Mobile is a channel to help people become
what they want to become on their journey
through life
67

Mobile is passion in volume
68

People pay for passion
69

70

Mobile is connections, links,
participation, transparency,
openness, and speed
71

Mobile is about cooperation,
collaboration
72

Mobile is about passion
Lost without it
Can’t go anywhere without it
All my connections
My life is in in my phone
73

In mobile marketing, you need to
• say goodbye to “marketing” as an exploitation vehicle,
where the only object is a sale
• say goodbye to the word “consumer”, as though their
only purpose is to be there while we convince them the
product they bought a year ago is obsolete
74

You, and your brand, must be
(radically) open to feeling
75

Mobile must be radically
open to passion
76

This house resolves
“Mobile will be more about passion
than utility”
How do you vote?
77

“A great musician is always in the act of
becoming.\" -- Bob Dylan
78

Thank you
Mark Linder, WPP
Joule – part of Mediacom
Iconmobile, Ogilvy Interactive, Wunderman
Chime/Bell-Pottinger Sans Frontières
79