Mobile-first content strategies: Navigating the digital landscape
The mobile marketing landscape is a very dynamic one, with rapid developments, technology, trends, and user behaviour shaping the future course. For six years, MOBEXX Summit and Awards, Adgully’s flagship event for the mobile industry, has been unraveling the intricacies of the mobile marketing landscape and anticipating emerging trends. In its seventh edition, MOBEXX Summit and Awards 2023 turned the spotlight on the biggest disruptions in the mobile marketing space, game-changing innovations, emerging trends, strategies, as well as some pressing challenges.
MOBEXX Summit and Awards 2023 saw a panel discussion on ‘Mobile-First Content Strategies: Navigating the Digital Landscape’. Chaired by Amit Duggal, Founder, of Monkeyminds, the panelists included:
- Hari Krishnan, Head of Content & Innovation, Publicis Groupé India
- Manas Gulati, Co-Founder & CEO, #ARM Worldwide
- Sudish Balan, Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer, Tonic Worldwide
- Chandrashekhar Naik, Senior Vice President, Valueleaf India
Amit Duggal commenced the discussion by noting, “When you create a platform which is not designated from a desktop perspective or a screen which is bigger than 10 inches and all, that is what mobile-first is. So, something like any UPI driven company or Uber and all, these are the mobile-first companies. If you look at these things, what has happened from last year’s perspective is that we are consuming around 22 GB of data per month, which means there is huge content consumption which is happening; moreover, 90% of the consumption is happening on mobile. That leads to the first question for the panel, which is ‘What is the kind of content strategy you are doing for your brands? And how are you managing it in this current day and age of heavy data consumption?’”
Manas Gulati responded by saying, “I remember this discussion some 10 years back. However, things have moved forward from the perspective of brands as well. Brand teams have become much more mature, like back in the day we used to plan websites and then adapt them on mobile. Now, we plan mobile and look at adapting it on the web as well and a lot of things have come into place, especially from a content standpoint, and all formats perspectives, be it email, the creative, the typography, the fonts which are being used, everything needs to be adaptive, and very much legible on a small screen. This is where the entire content strategy is moving in terms of, for instance, when you enter into a mall, there will be some geographical thing around you, and your message, which to me is very contextually relevant and if you are in a certain space where there are bigger brands like Adidas and offers are going on, it is very contextual and relevant. So, people have started thinking like that and not bombard across pan India, but have reached out to specific locations where the propensity to convert is very high, so from that standpoint, everybody has the equipment, the tools, also AI plays a big role in that, and that’s where we are all moving.”
Chandrashekhar Naik said, “When we are discussing mobile-first, as a strategy for content consumption, we will look at the scenario of how the content is being consumed in India – of late, the stats suggest that the rural penetration in terms of internet is twice that of urban. And that is possible because of the low mobile internet cost. That is because of very good penetration in terms of smartphones. Out of 800 billion internet users, we have close to 500 million-plus smartphone users. So, the strategy comes in terms of how do we try to reach out to this particular TG. It could be a device-based strategy, it could be a platform-based strategy and of course, a message-based strategy is what we have been doing traditionally. So, a lot of factors are counted in, and based on that, when we market brands, we devise a strategy based on all these three things.”
Hari Krishnan asked if mobile is first, then what is second? “The phenomenon with this industry is that one word keeps going on all the time and we pick it up and take it forward. Then we kind of keep repeating that. But a lot of changes have happened within that. And we are talking about the industry here. I think the tendency usually is to talk about very bottom-of-the-funnel things like conversion, clicks, so many people, and all of that. But fundamentally, if you look at the funnel, we still have not become mobile-first as an industry. I have a lot of creative agency background, and when they do top funnel work, and they want to create hero content on which crores of rupees are spent, it is still 16:9, it is not 9/16. So until we don’t think 9/16 for hero content, we are not going to become mobile-first. We will always be mobile last.”
Krishnan further said, “When we say mobile-first, it also traverses through the funnel – the entire content-to-commerce journey is through the mobile screen. We have done a lot of work around that, but I must say there is still a long way to go before we call the entire industry mobile first. That’s the starting point of this whole exercise.”
These are edited excerpts. For the complete panel discussion, please watch below:
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