Last night made way to the glitzy Performance Marketing Awards hosted by comedian Miles Jupp at the Prestigious Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane. We are thrilled to announce that affilinet were amongst the winners of the night which hosted over 800 guests.

The Performance Marketing Awards (formerly the a4u awards) celebrate excellence and innovation through a deeper harnessing of data, true multi-channel marketing and smarter collaboration. Here at affilinet, we are delighted to announce that we scooped up Best Travel and Leisure Advertiser award for Virgin Atlantic along with nonstopConsulting and were awarded Highly Commended for Debenhams in best Retail Advertiser. The awards were voted for by a panel of industry experts.

Congratulations to all Performance Marketing Awards winners. View pictures and updates from the event on our Twitter feed @affilinetuk. Also a big thank you to the Existem Team for doing such a fantastic job organizing the event. See you there next year…!

While mobile has opened up a host of opportunities for marketers to capture the hearts and wallets of the one in five consumers who begin their purchasing process via their mobile, however, it has also created some barriers for traditional advertising. Many consumers have become totally engrossed in their mobile world. How many people look out of the bus or car window and see the billboards on their way to work? These days many people seem to have their eyes glued to the small screen.

I have heard of quite a few dinner parties starting with a request to hand over mobiles, the first person to reach for theirs having to pay for the first round at the pub later! Of course not everybody is addicted to their phone, but one thing is certain: how people interact with and use their mobile device is a very personal experience.

Challenging device
Research from Nielsen has found that mobile is the most challenging device type for marketers to deliver campaigns that create an emotional connection. You aren’t going to be able to recreate the Coca-Cola Christmas ad moment via a mobile, because it is difficult to convey important visual signals like smiles on the small screen. Between 2010 and 2011, mobile ad spend in the UK grew by a staggering 157 per cent according to a report by the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers. If this growth continues, and marketers put their money into mobile, how can they ensure that they’re really capturing the consumer’s attention?

Brands must consider that people take their mobile devices everywhere, but also, that they constantly flick between desktop machines, their TV, even perhaps their partner’s Tablet, multi-screen multi-tasking to be precise. If a consumer encounters you via a punchy mobile display campaign, but not at any other point in their purchasing journey, the chances are that your message will get lost in the sea of other ads they have come into contact with. Yes, having a mobile presence and strategy is important, but it is not the only place marketers need to be, particularly at a time when brand loyalty cannot be guaranteed, and consumers are increasingly making their decisions based on price, rather than quality.

Emotionally engaging
One of the key characteristics of a successful multi-channel marketing strategy, therefore, will be to ensure that it is present at the right place at the right rice at the right time. In the mobile environment it is possible to reach the customer via push notifications from apps, email broadcasts, in-app banner placements, ads in mobile search results, and within barcode-driven price comparison applications.

Mobile will become more emotionally engaging, but we must not forget that when we reach out to someone via their mobile, we are trying to enter into their private world, often uninvited. True engagement, which remains the holy grail of marketing, is achieved by interacting with individuals across multiple channels and devices on their terms. Increasingly, mobile will become the centre of the marketing ecosystem, but it must also complement and reinforce messages from across the marketing mix.

Mobile advertising fever in our Dutch office grew to even greater heights this week as Jeroen Raaphorst and I made our way to the 3rd edition of the Mobile Convention Amsterdam.  Divided into 5 topic areas on paper this one day conference appears to cram a great deal of insight into what is effectively a working day!

So what was it like?

Allow Jeroen and I to explain:

• Big name speakers? Yep (Tom Bowman, BBC & Ian Carrington, Google to name a few)
• Lots of stats? Yep (We wrote down pages worth!)
• Lots of examples of successfully executed strategies? They were a bit thin on the ground

Does that mean 2012 is not the year of mobile after all?  No I don’t think so, large brands that have the resources to buy in expertise, or mobile specific agencies and mobile developers obviously get it and are making progress.  eBay already drives $5bn of revenue via its mobile optimized site & native mobile apps and expects this to accelerate by 60% to reach $8bn this year!

Key highlights from our perspective were:

1. Tom Bowman from the BBC: A multi-platform approach

We had to highlight this presentation, our UK colleagues told us that it was very hard to get tickets for this summers Olympics due to the ‘intelligent’ lottery system, this means most of them will be watching the action unfold remotely via the BBC despite living in the Capital!

Bowman highlighted that the event will be the most important event the organisation has covered in its 85 year history, so they have been doing a lot of preparation so that they can offer coverage to as many people around the world as possible.

They plan to offer brilliant coverage with 24 hd channels. To ensure this they will:

• Refresh websites
• Offer live video
• Personalisation
• Social integration
• Updates for every country, sport, event, and athlete

Key to this upgrade is the BBC’s new 4 screen strategy with experiences optimized for desktop, mobile, tablet and that old grand daddy – TV.

The broadcaster aims to offer all viewers the same experience regardless of the device which is used. This will be facilitated by responsive design and viewers will only have features which will completely work on their device.

Session Takeaway: It’s your audience and their experience that matters- less bells & whistles more simplicity (on the front end)

2. Justin Campbell from the Adgibbon: HTC Case Study

Adgibbon’s Justin Campbell presented a campaign that they developed for HTC’s ‘One’ device.  It was HTC’s first rich media campaign in the Netherlands, they used a number of approaches, most notable was the expandable format.

Figures

• 33.1% of the users clicked on the banner
• 1/3 closed the ad
• 1/3 didn’t touch the ad
• After the click 72% closed the expandable
• 2.22% visited the mobile landingpage

Takeaways

• Use different banners for wi-fi and 3G
• Stronger calls to action
• Keep an eye on landscape mode!
• Use screen rendering

3. Simon Liss from We Love Mobile: The New Mobile Shopper

We Love Mobile have been around for a while so they know their stuff. A key angle with there thesis is that it is not always the things that should succeed that do, i.e. good technology is not the answer in itself.  For example take QR codes…

Tech on its own is not the silver bullet for mobile

On paper they save time because you don´t have to type what you want to search for.  Just take the picture/scan and you are on the right website. This is a tech solution which works great!  However, only about 2% of smartphone owners are using this. And this number is declining (or that is what Liss said).  In this case the user  is deciding what works and they are continuing to use mobile search.  In my opinion, this lack of use could be because of limited retailer take up too and that the readers don’t ship as standard on many (if any handsets), but that’s another story..

The Future

Liss referenced several emerging topics

• Near Field Communication
• Augmented Reality
• LAYAR (its actually not that sepeaate, its augmented reality framework)
• Image recognition

and believes mixing real world and the digital world together will make more the most compelling engagement.

Takeaways

• It’s the user that matters
• Stop thinking mobile
• Start thinking experience
• Creating the new mobile shopper is easy
• It’s all about relevance and path to purchase

In conclusion…

Looking back at the convention I can tell that mobile is not the future, it is happening right now.   Unfortunately advertisers in general and quite a few publishers seem to have some way to go.  Not every advertiser has a mobile website yet (at affilinet we’re working on that!).  This is obviously going to restrict them and mean that they cannot reach their potential customers where ever they are.  Lots of people still don’t have a personal computer at home, but many have a smartphone!

The Native vs Web app debated continued, no surprises there!  At the conference the smart money appeared to be on the web app, it certainly makes discovery easier, there are certainly less Appstore Optimisation Experts than their SEO counterparts…

I would like to finish with a quote I have heard a number of times: ‘Stop thinking mobile, act mobile’. To check out the presentations from the day click here.

To find out how affilinet can drive performance based traffic to your mobile optimized website get in touch with your affilinet account manager today!