We are Entering into the Mobile World

Harvard Business School--held its 18th annual Cyberposium conference on Nov 2, drawing over 700 attendees to a panel of  co-founders of various technology companies. Mobile is the major issue for the panelist to talk about, especially the mobile advertising and the evolution of payment due to the mobile world. While technology drives the evolution of mobile, it changes the business model as well. 

What "Mobile" Means?

"Mobile" is the word to describe various platforms out there in the marketplace other than your desktops. More people are adopting smartphones and tablets and they are getting comfortable using them to surf on the Internet and chat with their friends. In fact, mobile is 2-6X faster than PC and online equivalents. In this way, people share, comment, chat and make purchases anytime and anywhere.

Mobile Advertising

Marketers are finding new opportunities in mobile advertising. The panelists mentioned that 60% mobile advertising is from search, others are from direct messages, websites banners, intervals between online streams and etc. Mobile advertising could be more attractive than PC's or online's because of the reason that once you click on an ad on your mobile platform, your focus is the ad that permeates the entire screen. Say, when you are playing an iPhone app game, advertisers like to insert ads before you start the game or before you are about to enter into the next level. When those ads appear, they stretch into the full screen so that you have to either click "skip" to skip them or wait for them to pass. In this way, effectiveness for mobile advertising is maximized. 

Real Time Engagement

Positive sentiments about particular brand take action immediately but negative sentiments as well. In the mobile world, people tend not to hesitate to post their true feelings about brands on social medial such as Instagram or Twitter. Targeting for particular brands is improved for marketers thanks to the increasing use of social networks. People are generating information about themselves, making it easier for marketers to target them. However, this makes harder for markets to create a clear brand message without people's disruptive inputs, so there is a growing challenge for marketer to pick a unique position for their brand to stand out in the marketplace. Also, due to people's higher expressive capabilities, it makes harder for managers to measure the advertising effectiveness as well.

Geolocation Provides Relevance 

Geolocation might be the most important aspect for mobile business. Most smartphones have the capability of providing geolocation data, providing more relevant data for marketers. For example, people use Foursquare to check in to find ads and coupons nearby their physical locations. Sharing locations on Foursquare is a great start to find ads that are relevant to you. Foursquare takes a more personal approach to their consumers. Consumers might miss some data relevant to them, but geolocation data can compensate for that. Geolocation data on Foursquare also provides recommendations from your close friends. However, challenges are still great for marketers because they have to figure out how to offer special coupons or ads for people with geolocation devices instead of just telling basic information as well as how to measure contributions from mobile.

Mobile is the Wallet

Mobile brings about the revolution of new transactions, and it changes the way marketers approach to people. Seeing PayPal and Google Wallet as examples, which connect mobile advertising to the global world. In order to work as a wallet, consumers have pay to get in, so it is not popular to make transactions on mobile wallets. How the mobile wallet is utilized is through ACH, which requires a banking account on all the links the bank build on the retailing network. Even though it seems exciting for marketers to do new business on mobile, regulations are many, and incumbence makes it difficult to innovate. Intermediary connection such as Google wallet or direct connection such as companies' websites is a choice for new business model in the mobile world.

Therefore, the development of both digital technology and social media is challenging the traditional business model. Mobile becomes a great part of the challenge to traditional business models. It is still a great challenge to make all mobile platforms compatible and to let banks and retailer agree on a selling model. But I think the new challenges end up pouring more energy and opportunities into the market.



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