• by Laurie Petersen , June 13, 2016

Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers gave her annual presentation on the state of Internet media this month, and the 213-slide deck once again featured the terrifying chart highlighting print advertising’s decline, and the continued rise of digital and mobile platforms.  

Back in 2011, Meeker’s report showed mobile media pulling in just 1% of ad spending versus 10% of people’s time spent with media. Print, meanwhile, accounted for a disproportionate 25% of ad spending while garnering just 7% of people’s time. Fast forward to last year and mobile pulled in 12% of ad dollars and 25% of people’s time, while print had slipped to 16% of ad spending against just 4% of time spent.  

Not surprising. You’re reading this on your phone, right? But it’s not the shift to mobile that is important. It’s the mobile apps that can incorporate knowledge of where you are and what you are doing that merit marketer attention.

We spoke with Brad Dobbs, director of publisher partnerships at mobile data provider PushSpring, to talk about how apps can play into cross-channel marketing — both as a destination and as an accelerant for targeting profiles that can be used on- and offline.

What can apps tell us?
Use of mobile devices now consumes five hours per day — much of it spent with mobile apps. The apps installed on a mobile device create very personal indicators of that person's interests. For example, the presence of Strava would clearly put that customer in the cycling world while the presence of Venmo indicates the customer is comfortable using their phone for mobile payments.

Someone who owns a lifestyle app is signaling how intense their interest is in certain activities such as travel or fitness tracking.

That sounds like common sense. What other insights can you glean?
Yes, those are pretty simple observations to make, but marketers can also get signals that indicate more complex lifestyle choices. A compilation of video streaming apps gives us reason to assume the person is pushing the bounds of video on demand, and may have cut the cord with their traditional cable or satellite provider.

App-installed data, by nature, is deterministic and therefore a solid foundation on which to start supplementing desktop and other connected-device campaigns. Those same Strava-owning cyclists will be just as interested in bikes on the Web and elsewhere, as they are on their mobile devices.

A deterministic data foundation extended across devices like connected TV and online streaming video creates a full feedback loop, allowing marketers to put the right message in front of customers at the exact right time. That means you can extend the foundation to the other seven or so hours people are on some kind of digital platform.

How can this inform campaigns?
Using this information in a mobile environment for conquesting and informing ad campaigns is an easy next step through leading DSP and DMP integrations for mobile campaigns. Even more enticing is that cross-device enablement providers, such as LiveRamp and TapAd, now offer a new way to reach these customers, regardless of device, by matching to online identifiers for those respective platforms.

When putting together a campaign to reach your future and existing customers, a tight understanding of what those behaviors are that make them unique will help you craft more meaningful messages, which in turn provide more engaged customers. Begin with the behaviors on a device that in some cases never leaves their side.

Wouldn’t that be where you would want to start?