How marketers are moving to a screen-agnostic planning approach for digital

Mobile as a medium is a quintessential part of every media mix, something the marketer or the advertiser cannot do without, said industry experts at a panel discussion on ‘Mobile marketing: A key part of every media mix’, during MOBEXX 2021, organised by Adgully on November 30, 2021.

The discussion was moderated by Anjali Malthankar, National Strategy, Director in India, Tonic Worldwide.

According to Shveta Singh, Chief Digital Officer, Motivator, GroupM, mobile marketing is very important in the overall media mix, “so much so that at GroupM we don’t use the term mobile marketing anymore. We have moved to a screen-agnostic planning approach for digital. The reason being, for us mobile marketing equals digital marketing. In terms of usage of mobile as a platform to access the Internet, in India there are 600 million-plus mobile users. Mobile is the primary screen. Digital marketing has to be mobile-first. Also, from a delivery point of view, it is not about what inventory you are choosing, but it’s about the audience who are on mobile. So, automatically the delivery gets skewed towards mobile. Today, 70-80 per cent of the marketing spend is going towards mobile marketing.”

Kunik Patel, Head - Industry Sales, Inmobi, remarked that mobile was an important medium even before the COVID scene. “If you are not leveraging mobile as a platform for your marketing, probably you are not leveraging the power of mobile,” he opined.

Adding further, Patel said, “Primarily because it gives you certain advantages which other mediums do not. The most important is the power of moment marketing, which enables you to reach users any time 24x7, irrespective of where they are, on a real-time basis. We can fine tune the approach as to how we are actually reaching out to the users in a more precise manner. Mobile gives you that leverage in terms of reaching out to the users. It is a medium which lets you fine tune the approach in terms of how we can reach out to the users in a more precise manner. Mobile gives you that leverage in reaching the users at the right moment by fine-tuning the message.”

Sharing her thoughts on this, Taranjeet Kaur, Head of Media, Digital and Media at Tata Consumer, said, “Ours is are a mobile-first country. Cheap data availability has enabled people to shift from feature phones to smartphones.”

Shveta Singh noted that in the post-COVID scenario, mobile consumption has grown both in depth and width. Elaborating further, she said, “Width means the kind of activities the consumer is doing; a lot more newer activities the consumer is used to doing online, such as e-learning, e-shopping, streaming content, etc. These activities have gone up in the post-pandemic era. That makes mobile the primary consumption device. And it cuts across demographics; this behaviour is here to stay and it will remain so. Because people have learnt new ways of doing things. From an implication point of view for a marketer there are many more touch points to take care of now. So, the complexity of mobile marketing has suddenly gone up.”

About the growth in the sector, Kunik Patel noted, “We have seen a surge in new app downloads, in categories like e-pharmacy, gaming, etc. Digital is the first priority for engaging customers. Marketers today are re-evaluating their priorities and strategies in a manner in which they not only want to survive but thrive in this post-COVID, mobile-first world.”

On the advantages of mobile marketing vis-à-vis other mediums, Taranjeet Kaur said that there is nothing called an “ideal mix”. “In earlier days, the second medium straight after TV used to be print. Now, it is actually mobile. That’s how evolution has happened. But what is your target audience? Do you want to target a feature phone user or a smart phone user or an app user? There are a lot of segments. That is important in terms of what you are really seeking – whether you are seeking conversion or awareness. That would lead to what kind of mix you really want to have in the overall media strategy that you are drafting. That is the first step. The second step is what do you really want to do,” she explained.

According to Shveta Singh, with mobile data, marketers are able to marry the offline and online journeys. “We can use the online app consumption data and marry it with onground activities that the consumer is doing. Therefore, one is able to stitch the offline and online journeys. That is one of the opportunities mobile provides, which no other medium can today,” she added.

Talking about the uniqueness of mobile, Kunik Patel said that location probably is of paramount importance when one talks about mobile; such as geo-fencing or geo-conquesting and so on. All these possibilities exist only in this medium. This is something marketers can leverage on a real-time basis. Plus, mobile is easily trackable and measurable across different journeys. Marketers will have an idea on ROI as well. Another aspect is that brands can leverage the viral potential provided by mobile, he further said.

Where in a consumer journey mobile marketing can play a role?

While stating that mobile marketing plays a significant role in the lower part of the funnel, Shveta Singh said, “On what role mobile plays really depends on what brands and categories you are working on. The research phase of funnel is where mobile will play a more important or significant role. In FMCG, there is an offline and online journey which keeps intersecting. Probably in a tech app, the entire journey could be mobile-driven.”

While affirming that mobile marketing plays an important role in the consumer journey, Kunik Patel noted, “Google has published that if a person has searched for a particular product on mobile screen prior to entering a store, he is more likely to convert almost seven times higher than a person who has not done so. The power of mobile is immense. It is difficult to take out mobile from each and every part of a user’s journey. Mobile plays a crucial role from the beginning till the end.”

Shveta Singh believed that when it comes to fulfilment and last-mile transaction, mobile plays an important role. That is why marketers give far more importance.

Kunik Patel added here, “Retail predominantly relies on middle or the bottom-funnel metrics with regard to conversions and ROI. Mobile has also helped in driving footfalls to the stores by running store mapping and footfall attribution kind of model on mobile platforms. We call it the ‘phygital’ side of things, wherein we are driving physical footfalls through an online activation through mobile and that is something that helped in getting decent results.”

To stress the importance of mobile in the marketing mix, Patel cited the example of Cadbury’s recent AI-powered hyper-personalised ad, where Shah Rukh Khan was seen endorsing the small kirana stores. It was an excellent campaign leveraging machine learning and voice and speech recognition.