Going Mobile

According to Adweek, i-shop R/GA has officially announced the arrival of their mobile marketing division.  Read the full article here.

From the article:

"Bob Greenberg, CEO of R/GA, said the mobile and emerging platforms practice would grow to be an integral part of the agency's offerings, on par with copyrighting and strategy.

"It's going to be very big," he said. "All of our clients are looking to do work in this area."

The R/GA mobile group will also include Webster Lewin, 45, who will lead mobile marketing for the group. Lewin comes to R/GA from WPP Group interactive shop VML, where he worked on wireless campaigns for clients like Burger King, Colgate-Palmolive and Microsoft. R/GA said it has also hired Claudia Bernett, 34, as an interaction designer for the mobile group. She previously worked at frog design."

Attention Ad people everywhere—did you catch that last hire?  Claudia comes from Frog Design.  A well-respected Design firm, not an Ad agency.  I'll spell out for you what this most likely means.  It means if you think R/GA will be looking at optimizing video spots for the small screen the same way the Ad agencies have pounced on YouTube as a an advertising distribution "channel", you are probably mistaken.  Sure there may be the use of video—but if the Nike ID effort is a sign of things to come, you can probably expect designers such as Bernett to be working on mobile applications which extend meaningful brand experiences to the mobile customer.

Comments

[Greg Verdino]

I think you're absolutely right David. Advertisers and mobile companies put a lot of emphasis on mobile video, maybe because the porting of the interruption-oriented tv ad model to mobile video (as it has been ported to broadband video.) But US consumers have so far been lukewarm. That may change, but I do believe that mobile applications (particularly ones that deliver significant value by leveraging the way consumers are already using their mobile devices) represent the bigger opportunity.

My other thought about this announcement: many agencies have announced the establishment of a dedicated unit to focus on one or another emerging marketing channel: mobile, social media, word of mouth, gaming... While that approach lends itself toward deep expertise in a specific channel and its prevalent tactics, it also presents the risk of creating a bunch of channel-specific silos that may or may not work together well. Day to day, we already see disconnects between on advertisers traditional (offline) agency and digital agency. Doesn't the creation of channel-specific silos potentially make for disconnects even between two digital channels?

[DA]

Greg,

You make a good point about holistically approaching the whole ball of wax. I think it all depends on how well the agencies intergrate themselves in addition to how well both clients and their agencies co-own the brand. A lot of assumptions and dependencies. Time will tell...

[Matt MacQueen]

Nice thoughts guys. It's good (and unfortunately all too rare) to see the field of marketing embrace methods typically seen in product development and mobile application design. (defining "what to build?" instead of "how do we message in this?") I agree just using emerging channels to pump the same push-based, recycled content into will never win over customers. In fact it's likely to make a new generation think less of a brand that "doesn't get it."

You only need to see the typically terrible way brands are advertising on social networks to prove these methods aren't the right way to look at an emerging new medium.

Good experiences enabled in a mobile and/or socially networked environment bring value to the customer and solve for a problem, pain-point or need. Designing good brand experiences are becoming more like product development and thankfully less of what has traditionally been thought of as "advertising".

I'd argue this is yet another indicator that those marketers and agencies out in front are actually practicing user-centered design (in it's broadest sense).

Cheers.

[DA]

Matt,

As you already know, Advertising, like Business in general is struggling with true innovation issues. Advertising is well equipped to take advantage of ever changing trends, but it's more difficult to think like true designers or creative problem solvers.

But these skills are sorely needed. YouTube wasn't only the right "big idea" at the right time, it's also a pretty decent experience that actually works.