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Is mobile hastening the end of predictable behavior?

Here is an insightful article (Is mobile hastening the end of predictable behavior?) relating to various issues on mobile advertising. Summarising on the key issues, they would be:

  • IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT - "First, it (mobile) allows for brand interactions to happen at any time and any place, so understanding the CONTEXT of the interaction is more important than ever before," he said.
  • IMPORTANCE OF MORE CHANNELS - "Second, a breed of devices complicate marketing efforts because they INTRODUCE MORE CHANNELS to the marketing mix and require a specific type of expertise." The MORE CHANNELS companies have in their arsenal, the HIGHER the LIKELIHOOD that they will CONNECT with consumers.
  • MORE LIQUID APPROACH - "...rather than make definitive statements about what customer behavior is and what it may be, it helps to adopt a MORE LIQUID APPROACH – in Coca-Cola's words – as to WHAT IS HAPPENING AT ANY MOMENT."
  • CONSUMERS, EASILY DISTRACTED NOWADAYS, SEGMENTATION - Nowadays, CONSUMERS have very short attention spans. And, with mobile and other emerging technology, they are EASILY DISTRACTED, which is a big contribution to the ongoing problem... it is important that marketers SEGMENT their customers and understand that they are different and to group them into behavioral segments.
  • IN-APP IS BETTER THAN PUSH - "Don't hang your hat on push notifications, because if you abuse your permission to send unsolicited notifications to people's mobile devices, they will shut you off. LOOK TO OTHER CHANNELS LIKE IN-APP MESSAGES or email," Mr. Pietrzak said.
  • IMPORTANCE OF MOBILE ANALYTICS PLATFORMS - "Understand ATTRIBUTION," he said. "Develop a plan to estimate attribution to see where your customers are coming from." "But even if a channel doesn't directly link to a purchase, it may be important for other parts of the funnel. This is often the case with social." Many analytics and marketing tools in mobile are currently disaggregated or feature-specific, which frustrates marketers because it forces them to bring these different pieces together in-house with apples and oranges comparisons across data. These tools will continue to converge into powerful platforms that provide them with a big-picture view of mobile behaviors and also provide a stronger link to the mobile Web and desktop Web. Additionally, it is all about analytics and data. With these, marketers are able to look at different behavior and help in the end of predictability. “MOBILE ANALYTICS PLATFORMS will start closing the loop on attribution across the customer lifecycle, which will give marketers a much better understanding of ROI and LTV in the mobile space,” Mr. Pietrzak said. "...What this amounts to, in the aggregate, is the harnessing of data being generated across mobile devices to predict consumer behaviors with a lot more clarity and precision."
  • HUMAN INTUITION STILL COUNTS A LOT - "A recent New York Times article spoke to the limits of computer intelligence, explaining that for the all the data processors out there and all the computer code being written, a growing number of humans are required to interpret that incoming data; to help search engines better tailor their results to what people are actually searching for," Ms. Horwell said.

My final take on how best to extract value and find revenue from mobile advertising would be: Strengthen the mobile analytics platform and couple it with deep domain knowledge about consumer behaviour in the apps and context that we are studying.