• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, February 13, 2012

SapientNitro was recently cited as having the leading mobile practice among large U.S. digital agencies evaluated by Forrester. Mobile Marketing Daily spoke to Dan Israel, mobile strategy lead at SapientNitro, about the agency’s approach to mobile, the outlook for 2012, and mobile wallets, among other topics. Prior to joining SapientNitro, Israel led consumer mobile strategy at The Home Depot.

MMD: How is the mobile group at SapientNitro organized?

Israel: Overall, we’re about 10,000 strong -- 5,000 in India and 5,000 in 38 offices around the world. We have about 300 people devoted to mobile strategy, creative and technology domains with varied levels of industry experience. And in Atlanta, we have something called the Mobile Center of Excellence, focused on mobile and multichannel delivery for clients worldwide, which has about 50 to 60 people in it.

So what we’ve been trying to do is pepper all the offices with people that have some sort of mobile and multichannel expertise, so that way, they can start developing some of these competencies. So not all of the offices have strategy, UX [user experience] and development. Some may have all three -- it just depends which office we’re talking about.

MMD: What’s the approach in working with clients?

Israel: We’re focused on what are the business objectives first, what is the right experience to overlay on that, and then figuring out what the right technology is. Then we can do one of two things: either bring together the right people who can make that technology internally, or if the client prefers, we’ll use their resources.

Given that we don’t approach mobile as a channel or a piece of technology, the challenge is often to understand how people want to interact with the information on a particular device, and what’s the best way to present an experience that is easy to use, easy to understand, and relevant to that moment. We help customers understand how to weave mobile into their overall business and marketing objectives.

MMD: Do clients view mobile the same way they might social media -- as a vehicle for earned or owned media rather than paid media?

Israel: Let’s first make the statement that mobile and social media are becoming so intertwined that it’s hard to make a distinction. Today, there is a new term making the rounds that epitomizes this reality -- “solomo.” It refers to a mash-up of social media, location and mobile devices.

In the good old days of “Mad Men,” customer experiences -- good or bad -- had limited ability to affect your business in a dramatic way. Owned media shaped what people should think, and what they should buy. Today, the combination of mobile devices along with social media networks means positive or negative customer experiences can be broadcast to a huge audience rapidly, with flagrant disregard for whatever is done in the owned media space.

MMD: Do you expect clients’ mobile budgets to be bigger this year than last?

Israel: Mobile budgets are going up, and in particular in the retail industry. Their customers are coming in with better information than what their own sales associates have, and you try to equalize it by providing better mobile experiences that engage consumers on their terms, and also to empower sales associates to have the same level of information. So a lot of our clients are saying, “Hey, help us figure out what we should be doing in the mobile space.”

So the budgets are increasing, we are getting specific requests for mobility to be injected in everything they’re doing. It’s no longer one of these one-off things. And we’re hiring a lot in the mobile space, and we would only be doing that if we anticipated more revenue coming from our existing clients and new clients.

MMD: What’s usually the biggest barrier for clients looking to expand mobile efforts -- complexity, lack of scale, uncertainty about ROI?

Israel: Many clients are overwhelmed by the speed at which the device landscape and enabling technologies are changing consumer behavior. Also, many still struggle with the mindset that mobile can be approached separately, as just another channel. It’s our job to show clients that mobile has to be part and parcel of a holistic multichannel strategy.

The challenges are threefold. First, some companies have the desire but not the organizational readiness to implement mobile solutions. For instance, mobile initiatives may be considered a secondary project that gets addressed when time permits.

Second, some incumbent agency partners don’t bring the right mix of mobile understanding to the table. Third, some clients have legacy systems that cannot be accessed by mobile devices or connected across channels. In addition, the content may not be optimized for mobile devices, and may not even have APIs available to pull the information into access points beyond enterprise PCs. 

MMD: What developments, if any, do you think will define the mobile space in 2012 or beyond?

Israel: I think the next big wave is mobile wallets. It’s not going to hit tomorrow, but it’s something that’s evolving. That’s a very complicated ecosystem to set up. From an NFC (Near Field Communication) standpoint, you have to get nine pieces in alignment to offer a mobile wallet.

Who do companies partner with, whether you’re a financial institution or a retailer, how are the business models going to change, what are technology bets you’re going to make? Those are all things -- I wish we could make this ecosystem easier to evolve.

MMD: Do you see any big winners emerging in the mobile wallet space?

Israel: I think we’ll see multiple winners. I think it will probably boil down to an oligopoly. In the NFC space, you’ve got Isis and Google Wallet, in the cloud space you’ve got PayPal and Amazon. People aren’t sure what Apple is going to do, or Facebook. Microsoft just announced their mobile wallet solution. So everyone is still trying to figure out what to do. No. 1, how do you bring together all the pies of the ecosystem?

The second major challenge is how do you get retailers to play ball? If you don’t lower the transaction fees, you’re not going to get retailers to put in these new POS systems and advocate for this with their own customers. No. 3, how do you get consumers to change their behavior? Why would I be incented to wave my “magic” phone over some POS system? It’s just not that compelling.

So there’s going to be more experimentation this year -- this is not the year of the mobile wallet. This is the year of experimentation.