The World Cup starts this evening and all us football fans are looking forward to being glued the TV all evening, every evening, for many weeks and, when we aren’t, to filling out our World Cup wall charts.
Wait a minute? Glued to the TV? Yes, even in 2018, the World Cup is in terrestrial TV – probably the last great blast of TV football ever. How sport – and many other things – are consumed is changing. Amazon has signed up to stream 20 Premier League matchesover the next three years as it attempts to lure in more Prime members.
But there is another move afoot and that is that it is a massive marketing opportunity for the retail giant.
And so is the World Cup. While we shall all be glued to the TV, we are also likely to also be avidly gripping out iPads and phones while we watch: assessing stats, catching up with other matches and generally immersing ourselves in the festival of football.
This is going to be the real marketing battle ground of the tournament. Accessing all these billions of second screeners. But is it such a great opportunity? In many ways we are still in unchartered water with this form of mobile marketing: in fact second screening has sort of come and gone while mobile marketing has been a thing then, unpredictably, not a thing anymore.
The problem is that consumers no longer want things popping up on their phones – they may stomach some ads in games rather than pay, but pop ups and banners et al are now defunct. In fact, 30% of marketers see mobile ads now as a waste of money.
The issue is that people want an experience and they want personalisation. Pop ups are the antithesis of this. They are intrusive, unwanted and often poorly targeted.
While second screening the World Cup, no one is going to want to be interrupted. It just isn’t cricket any more… which is such a mixed metaphor, it’s almost like I did it deliberately.
Anyhow, there may yet be a way around this and a way that may see a rebirth of mobile marketing.
Mobile programmatic ads that offer some degree of personalisation – and the deal between Headway, a leading provider of mobile, programmatic, data and performance digital marketing solutions mobile-first programmatic platform Smadex could see that all change.
Offering a more personalised programmatic experience is what is needed around mobile marketing and it needs to be tailored both to context – say the World Cup – and to the location, time of day and the whatever you can possibly (and legally) know about the target person.
This sort of approach will make programmatic on mobile something that could reverse this trend away from mobile marketing in the sense we have come to know it and make it more useful all round.
On another note, it is with happy-sad face that we say goodbye and good luck to Chris Newell and Paul Paterson from ImpulsePay. The two who have ushed the carrier billing provider into the mainstream and done so much for telemedia are now poised to move on to bring carrier billing to the third sector at donr.
I have worked with both Chris and Paul over the years many times and two finer upstanding gentleman you couldn’t wish to meet. It’s been a pleasure lads and donr’s gain is our loss. Good luck also to Adam Williams who is taking over at ImpulsePay. I look forward to working with him immensely.
