• by Jack Feuer , January 19, 2016

By 2020, 80 percent of adults on earth will have a smartphone. The Media Kitchen probably won’t have campaigns running on every one of those devices. Probably. Seldom does one see a shop pursue expertise and thought leadership in a space with such relentless enthusiasm as the Kitchen has with mobile. Its executives are all over the trade press talking mobile strategy and tactics, and evangelizing for movable media. And its work in the space for clients such as Goldman Sachs and Just For Men broke new ground.

“Nowadays every plan has some mobile component,” says Lowenthal. “Also, it’s much easier to include mobile in our plans since so much of or media is bought programmatically.”

Because of its determination to understand how mobile is transforming marketing, and then executing against that with sharp, effective campaigns that maximize what is possible with the technology, Media Kitchen is MediaPost’s 2015 Mobile Agency of the Year.

Indeed, the AOY submission the “Chefs” created was as much a primer on movable platforms as it was a promotion vehicle for the agency. It was in that deck, in fact, that we discovered the statistic that leads this story.

In 2015, the agency left no mobile stone unturned. It focused on cross-device tracking, the mobile purchase funnel, mobile ad blocking, conversational commerce, the dominance of first-party platforms, mobile modes of media production, Apple Pay versus Android Pay, and just about any other mobile-related topic. 

The agency walks the walk when it talks about integrating mobile, a goal of every plan that’s considerably easier said than done. Kitchen does it, Lowenthal explains, “because every single Chef is fluent in mobile … everyone knows how to consider mobile opportunities and solutions, just like they know how to plan and buy TV, print, out-of-home and social. They know that mobile itself is not a siloed channel; it is a connected node within the larger media ecosystem that includes desktops, laptops, tablets, TVs and radio.”

Among the successes this approach allows is the Goldman Sachs recruiting effort, which partnered with Snapchat on Campus Stories, from about 60 campuses nationwide. Each school — a key recruiting target — had a curated story about what was happening on campus that day via student snaps. Creative showed how a career at Goldman Sachs could intersect with students’ skills, education and interests. In the nine days of the campaign, the client’s Careers website saw an 82 percent rise in users from organic search and an 11 percent increase in overall visits. Messaging was also placed in Yieldmo content streams and long-form video on Sled.

“Mobile,” Lowenthal concludes, “has changed the dynamics of the media industry.” The Media Kitchen is leading the way in figuring out what to do about it.