For the last decade, marketers online have tagged and tracked, extrapolated small activities into perceived signals of “intent” and otherwise tried to read the tea leaves of online
behaviors to glean and influence future action. Mobile media is poised to make those practices even more powerful by adding the layer of location to the data set. Given the correct opt-ins and
permissions, the relatively two-dimensional plane of desktop surfing is massively expanded by adding the dimension of movement in and about precise points in the world.
Fine. I look forward to
testing and covering these instances for the next five years, just as I have for the last five in these columns.
But I started musing a bit the other day in my daily MoBlog about the ways in
which mobile platforms can change the polarity on our thinking about “behavior.” At Cannes this week, Google and Grow Interactive won the Mobile Lions Grand Prix for their reimagining of
the famous Coke hilltop ad “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” as a cross-platform user engagement in which people could indeed buy others Cokes around the world. In short, the
campaign took a classic of lean-back mass media of the 70s and demonstrated how interactivity, massive connectivity of devices and mobility could turn it into an occasion of highly personal
participation and action.
It is worth musing further, because Coke/Google/Grow’s campaign was not the only Cannes winner to embody this idea of what I will dub the “branded
action.” The Microloan charity of London won a gold Lion for a “Pennies for Life” campaign where SMS donations completed digital portraits of the African businesswomen the drive was
intended to support. Your virtual “pennies” became visual ones in public that completed these portraits.
A Russian city newspaper created an app aimed at relieving the problem of
illegal parking by allowing users to snap pictures of improperly parked cars and then have them fed into dynamic mobile banner ads geotargeted to those locations. It was a strange exercise in public
shaming, appropriately called “Parking Douche.”
British TV’s Channel 4 issued a “Street Tag” app that served as a virtual spray paint can, allowing people
to post virtual graffiti on the streets.
What interests me about these examples is the way in which they reverse the polarity of digital marketing from following people’s
behaviors to collaborating with users on behaviors and actions in the world. Rather than seeing mobile technology as a mere extension of the Web and as an opportunity to follow and target people
closer to point-of-sale or closer to the moment of inspiration, these campaigns exercise a new reflex. What if we imagined mobile as a consumer tool in the world that a brand has the opportunity to
sponsor?
Even as smartphones seem to marketers like little computers in one’s pocket, it is a mistake to think of them as miniature and portable desktops. There is a reason why the first
media formats to succeed on mobile were highly personalized -- SMS and ringtones. Both formats came out of nowhere and represented incredibly low-bandwidth types of media. SMS was the opposite of the
bottomless Web. Ringtones on feature phones were sub-low-fi. But both media allowed users to communicate with one another and to broadcast to the world in highly personalized ways.
This notion
of empowering people to take action on the world, to express themselves in this world, is going to be enormously powerful. The brands that get that about mobile devices are the ones that will move us
beyond the simple-minded “mobile-as-next-Internet” thinking. The transformation here is not just toward personalized media but actionable media. It is not just connectivity back to the
Internet, but connectivity among devices in the world in real-time.
David Verklin made famous the phrase “data is the new media,” which almost certainly is true. But mobile helps
us rethink that a bit more. Perhaps action is the new media.