I don't
review books very often. In fact, I'm pretty sure the last book review I wrote was for my college newspaper, and it was for Norman Mailer's "Executioner's Song." But when a friend and colleague hands
you an autographed copy of his newly published book, and points out that he has thanked you in the "Acknowledgement" section for having helped inspire part of it, well, I guess you don't have much
choice but to review it. I'm telling you this for two reasons: 1) So you understand from the onset that I don't know how to write book reviews (so don't be disappointed); and 2) That I'm coming at
this one with a fair amount of bias toward the author, Chuck Martin, and his new book, "The Third Screen."
When he's not writing books (he's got a few of them under his belt) or teaching the next generation of digital-savvy industry pros at the University of New Hampshire, Chuck is the head of MediaPost's
Center for Media Research, and as such, has access to oodles of data, insights, and perspectives on the world of digital marketing -- including mobile media and marketing, which "The Third Screen" is
about. But it's more than that. "The Third Screen" is about how the behavior of people and organizations are changing because of a number of technological developments, especially the proliferation of
smartphones and other computer-enabled, Web-connected, applications-downloadable handheld devices. So, yes -- "The Third Screen" is, as its subhead suggests, about "marketing to your consumers in a
world gone mobile," but it is really about my favorite subject -- how the acceleration of media technologies is changing the way human beings behave.
There are many manifestations of that, and
obviously, mobile media continues to iterate, adapt, and manifest new and as-yet-unimagined changes on mankind, but when Chuck asked me what I thought about the impact mobile was having on marketing a
year or so ago when he first started working on the book, I told him it was ushering in the era of the "untethered consumer." By that, I meant that consumers were no longer constrained by the physical
or psychological boundaries of classic marketing channels. What Chuck has compiled in "The Third Screen" is one of the best primers on how those changes are manifesting, and what the specific
implications are for marketers, agencies and publishers looking to get a handle on them.
"Looking at the smartphone as just another sales or marketing channel misses the scope of the mobile
revolution," Chuck writes in "The Third Screen," adding: "Mobile is not incremental, it is transformational. It takes the concept of customer engagement to a new level, where the customer is totally
in the driver's seat and each interaction is unique in the interplay between customer and business and brand."
Chuck's right, of course, but if there is one fault with "The Third Screen," it is
that it looks at the "mobile revolution" as a relatively stand-alone phenomenon, and doesn't explain it in the context of a number of other simultaneous and overlapping progressions that have led up
to this new untethered marketing mindset. Mobile is not a technology or a platform. It is a mindset and a way of being. The first time I really thought about it that way was some years ago when WPP
chief Martin Sorrell gave a speech at an investor's conference and cited trend data showing that the amount of time people spend "out-of-home" and away from the office had grown from about 8% in the
1960s to more than 16%. The data revealed significant lifestyle changes -- and marketing opportunities and challenges -- underlying the fact that human beings were becoming an increasingly transient
species, and that we were and would expect media to follow us along our paths. The mobile revolution obviously plays right into that, and most likely is accelerating it.
What Chuck does do
amazingly well, however, is explain how mobile relates to all the other major media technology shifts that have also been influencing these underlying changes in consumer and marketing behavior --
especially how mobile is impacting and augmenting other popular digital marketing platforms such as search, social, and of course, the Web.
In fact, Chuck doesn't even call mobile search,
"search." He calls it "finding," and says it is like conventional browser-based search "on steroids."
"On a computer, looking for something is correctly labeled search," he explains. "On mobile,
a more correct label would be 'find,' and I call the next generation of mobile tools designed to locate necessary information finders rather than search engines." Chuck uses such labels to distinguish
not just between technologies and interfaces, but genuinely different manifestations in consumer behavior. The fundamental difference, he says, is the simple term "search is not enough."
"Looking
for information on a computer is often quite different from looking for information on mobile. When people search on a computer, they have an idea of what they're looking for... On mobile it is not so
much about searching as it is about finding. People on the go don't need to know all the available options everywhere, they typically need to know what's near them now."
Chuck even has a term for
the next generation of mobile searchers, and he calls them "finders" -- consumers who take advantage of the capabilities of mobile phones to leverage location, movement, proximity, time, context,
intent and connectivity -- related to what they are searching.
Chuck makes similar analogies about how mobile is transforming every other aspect of traditional and emerging media and commerce.
And if you ask me, it's a pretty good crash course if you're looking to bone up on the impact the Third Screen is having on the Fourth Estate.