New research from Ernst & Young indicates that 88% of TV viewers say they multitask with a computer while watching TV. And nearly half of viewers say they are on their mobile phone while watching TV. In a panel discussion in New York Tuesday put on by Ernst & Young to discuss its research, Interpublic Group CEO Michael Roth mused: “Our lives are blurring from a device standpoint.” For clients, that’s both a blessing and a curse, he said, noting that commercials “give you a break” from watching content, and that allows viewers to check emails or go online to view content that may or may not be related to the TV programming. The challenge for advertisers and agencies, he added, is to make commercials that engage viewers so they don’t completely disengage with the TV set. Mobile technology, said Roth, is key to the company’s future growth -- given that in many markets, mobile has bypassed other technologies to become the primary communications means for consumers. “We’re getting double-digit growth in emerging markets” like China and Brazil, said Roth, adding that those growth rates will continue. Smartphones will be the core device that integrates other forms of communications, he said, adding that consumers are using smartphones more frequently to access the Internet than computers. But there’s a “disconnect,” said Roth, between the amount of mobile usage -- which is soaring -- and ad spending in the space, which is lagging. He likened it to the same gap that occurred when Internet usage first took off a decade ago. It took a while for advertisers to shift significant amounts of money from traditional media, which was being used less, to digital. Just as that gap has narrowed, so will the gap that now exists on the mobile front between consumer usage and ad spending. The Ernst research also found that the average home in the U.S. now has four devices connected to the Internet, an average that will likely climb half again in just two to three years. Michael Fries, president and CEO of cable company Liberty Global, responded that the more devices households have connected to the Internet the better -- at least for his business. "I want 10 devices in the home because [consumers will] need a bigger pipe," to connect to the Web. He predicted that in three years' time, providing subscribers with Internet connections will constitute 40% of Liberty's revenues.
As much as it has grown in the past two decades, the Internet is set to become an even more disruptive economic force in the next five years as more developing countries begin to expand their access, according to a new study from the Boston Consulting Group. According to the BCG, which surveyed approximately 1,000 consumers in each of the world’s 20 largest countries, roughly half of the world’s population (3 billion people) will use the Internet, and the so-called “Internet economy” in those G-20 countries will be $4.2 trillion by 2016 -- up from about $2.3 trillion in 2010. “The speed and scale of change that the Internet is responsible for driving in all sorts of businesses is really remarkable,” David Dean, senior partner at BCG and coauthor of the report, tells Marketing Daily. “It’s very fair to say that the change that will happen in the next three to five years is far, far larger than any other change that has happened in the past 10 to 20 years.” Much of the coming explosion in growth will come from developing countries, where Internet connections are still being made, smartphone adoption is nascent and consumers have yet to gain comfort with online retail channels. But once those hurdles are cleared, Dean says, the explosion of the Internet economy will be huge -- particularly in places where offline retail shopping is less pleasurable. “[In many developing countries], the experience of buying online is much more exciting and pleasurable than going to some dreary store,” Dean says -- noting that the percentage of online shopping could be much higher in those countries than in the U.S., where the online shopping rate stands at 5% of total commerce. “Everywhere you go in the U.S. you’ve got stores and shopping malls and there’s a retail experience close to hand. Consequently, there’s somewhat of a lower need to go to online.” At the same time, the report attempts to put a dollar value of the Internet’s value for consumers in these various markets. In the U.S., for instance, consumers said they would have to be paid, on average, $2,528 a year (or 5.4 times what they pay for access and services) to live without Internet access. Twenty-one percent said they would be willing to give up sex for a year in order to keep their Internet access; 77% said they’d forgo chocolate; 43% said they’d give up exercise and 7% said they’d give up showering. The study also found that younger consumers would have to be paid more to give up their Internet access and services, but Americans over 55 would also require more than the average, Dean says. “That’s partly because it’s a new experience that they’re beginning to get their arms around and they see the value in it.” The full report can be found here.
Publishers are making tablets a top priority when it comes to technology development this year. About 60% of business-to-business and business-to-consumer publishers cited tablets, mobile publishing and/or new Web products as a “high priority," according to a new survey by the Software & Information Industry Association. Other types of projects were not mentioned nearly as widely. About four in 10 (42%) of the 85 publishers surveyed by the SIIA named licensing and syndication as a key area of focus this year, while 19% cited video. The study found that B2C companies tend to prioritize tablet publishing above all else, while their B2B counterparts put the creation of new Web-based offerings slightly above mobile and tablet publishing. When it comes to management’s perspective, C-level and VP-level executives are more focused on tablets than director-level company officers, suggesting that the former are looking further ahead than less senior managers. An even bigger divide was seen between sales and marketing employees. Only one-quarter of sales staffers mentioned tablets as high priority, compared to 70% of those in company marketing departments. Salespeople tended to heavily favor Web-based publishing, with three-quarters rating online efforts a top consideration. When it comes to mobile platforms, the vast majority (68%) are currently publishing on the iPad and 58% on the iPhone. Android-based phones and tablets have attracted only 38% and 35% of publishers, respectively, to date. Just 17% have created apps using Facebook’s Open Graph, and 16% have created content tailored to the Kindle. But since Facebook has only recently begun expanding Open Graph to new types of apps, and the Kindle Fire was launched last November, those figures are likely to increase. At the MPA Digital: Swipe conference Tuesday, keynote speaker Paul Verna, a senior analyst at eMarketer, encouraged magazine publishers to extend content to tablets to generate new revenues as the print business will have flat-to-negative growth in the next five years. “The only thing more challenging than digital monetization is print monetization,” he said. eMarketer projects that more than a quarter (27.7%) of Americans will use tablets by 2014, up from almost 11% in 2011.
Twitter last month announced it would begin testing Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts in the timelines, searches and suggested follows on its mobile apps. Now the company says it will expand that effort by allowing advertisers to target campaigns specifically to iOS and Android users, as well as those on other mobile devices, PCs or laptops. Twitter will also begin to allow brands to target Promoted Tweets in the timelines of mobile users that share similar interests with their existing followers. “Mobile device targeting is great for brands that want to increase the prominence and reach of their message to a particular type of mobile user. For example, mobile game and app sellers can now pinpoint the users who are likely to purchase their products,” noted the company in a blog post today. Twitter cited American Express, Samsung and Verizon as marketers that are using Promoted Tweets to reach consumers on mobile devices. Reactions to the new mobile ad options introduced three weeks ago had been positive, the company noted -- paving the way for the latest upgrades. Originally, Promoted Trends and Tweets only appeared in search and Promoted Tweets only in the timeline on Twitter mobile (m.twitter.com).
It seems like announcements about new mobile wallets and mobile payments are occurring with increasing frequency. There is industry-darling Square, of course -- which you can plug in to the top of an iPhone or the bottom of an Android phone, allowing personal swiping of credit cards, which works easily and well. And there are various other credit card devices that attach to mobile phones, and even my local taxi driver in New Orleans last week had one connected to his full-featured phone, along with a mini-printer for receipts. At SXSW in Austin recently, a panel on mobile payments tackled the issues of the why and when of mobile payments. The panelists focused on Isis, the joint venture with Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile that aims to provide a mobile commerce network for merchants, banks and other carriers. The panelists agreed that a lot of mobile banking is taking place, with some $4 billion of transactions already occurring. They also agreed that this will not be the year of large-scale adoption of any mobile payment options, including Isis. The first two test markets for Isis are Austin and Salt Lake City, both slated to launch this summer. Isis uses NFC (near field communication) and they say about a quarter of U.S. retailers are essentially NFC-ready. “The technology (NFC) is nothing new,” said Ryan Hughes, chief marketing officer of ISIS. “VeriFone says 100 percent of their terminals are NFC.” Earlier this week, payment gateway VeriFone announced that more than $10 billion worth of U.S. transactions a year now go through its mobile payments system. But the panelists were not so much focused on the actual payment using a mobile phone as the value a consumer could potentially receive because of the mobile payment capability. The idea is that with on-the-spot information about customer location and payment history, retailers could provide coupons and other deals with higher relevance to “enrich the shopping experience,” as one of the panelists said. “It’s just a shift in experience,” said Hughes. Hughes and team also brought an Isis-enabled vending machine as a demo for SXSW attendees. At the booth on the main floor of the Austin Convention Center, large crowds of people continually waited in line to see the machine in action. One of the many Isis marketers would tap their NFC-enabled phone to the front of the machine where you’d normally insert coins and the phone would be charged the 50 cents for a promo booklet that would drop out of the front slot of the machine. The level of interest in contactless payments was one of the more intriguing factors -- both at the demo display and at the sessions. The panel session was packed and when it came time for questions an extremely long line of people rapidly lined up behind the microphone. While Isis is focused on serving retailers, the questioners overwhelmingly wanted to know about person-to-person payments. One of the questions dealt with the obvious issue of security, which Hughes cited as the number one concern of customers. The Hughes answer? “A single call to your carrier can shut your wallet down.” As a side note, to test compatibility, I loaded my Google Wallet MasterCard app on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus and sure enough, my account was instantly charged and out came the booklet. However, when I pointed out to the person demonstrating the system that my wallet was charged $1.25 rather than 50 cents, he said the number would ultimately be corrected, although my account is still out the $1.25 for a 50-cent booklet. Chuck Martin is author of The Third Screen; Marketing to Your Customers in a World Gone Mobile, CEO of Mobile Future Institute and Director of the Center for Media Research at MediaPost Communications.
Velocity and differentiation are the most important elements to making online digital work, according to David Kenny, chairman and CEO at The Weather Channel, during an interview with Joe Mandese, editor in chief at MediaPost, kicks off OMMA Global on Tuesday. He created the digital agency -- Digitas and Vivaki – but has moved to the jumped to the publishing side. The two begin by looking back at predictions Kenny made during a previous OMMA Global. Mobile is what's driving incremental growth at The Weather Channel, Kenny said, estimating about 200 tweets about the weather per minute. People want to talk about the weather, he said. Mobile apps also take the company worldwide. The 150 million could grow to 600 million as the company expands worldwide, he said.