Entertainment Media: Marketing Strategies for Mobile Platforms

Marketing executives across all industries are woefully ignorant how to handle mobile platforms, according to a recent Adobe report on Digital Distress. Only 9 percent of marketers are confident they’re doing digital marketing properly and 83 percent haven’t been formally trained in any capacity on mobile marketing. Michael Becker, market development & strategic advisor for Somo Ltd., intends to chip away at that ignorance.

Somo, headquartered in the U.K. with five other offices around the world, is a mobile marketing agency that provides a soup-to-nuts solution from strategy and creative to engineering apps and media planning/buying.

“Somo helps you figure where to place your bet in mobile marketing,” said Becker. “And now it’s wrapped around an analytics engine.”

Becker, who has been in the mobile industry for decades and formerly headed the Mobile Marketing Association, is still evangelizing for a technology that is under-used not just in the entertainment industry, but across many industry sectors.

“Your customers care about mobile,” said Becker. “Studios and networks have to realize that mobility and mobile connectivity is at the center of their customers’ life cycle. If they don’t understand how to be present and relevant, they’re losing business.”

Technological advances have opened the door to an increasing number of ways that content creators can use mobile to reach end users. Becker points to the possibilities inherent in augmented reality.

“With AR, there is overlaying the world with data, including video,” he noted. “If a particular movie studio wanted to, they could provide AR information in Los Angeles that would show where movies or TV shows were filmed, with clips and trailers. That can unleash value of all those assets sitting there in the vault. It’s no longer tethered to the computer — it’s layered over my eyeballs and accessible to me at any point in time.”

Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE or BLE) is a new protocol that allows a brand to have bi-directional communication between a phone app and a “point of interest” within a store or any other location. That’s done with a beacon, a small item that offers accuracy up to inches. A user who opts-in can follow and find the beacons, unleashing content or other communications. Apple’s iBeacon technology was used to create a scavenger hunt for attendees at CES 2014.

But Becker cautioned against implementing these technologies without a plan.

“To be successful in mobile, don’t start with mobile, start with the basics,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s not about technology or devices or protocols. It’s about delivering and exchanging value between brand and consumer. And the beautiful thing about entertainment content is that it is a wonderful layer of emotional connection.”

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