For mobile, the Lions still sleep
So here we are at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Both Jeremy Wright, Nokia Interactive Advertising’s Global Director of Mobile Brand Strategy, and I had been asked to take one of the new series of ‘master classes’ in the Young Lions Zone.
Our plan is to impart some vital knowledge to these talented under 27-year-old agency creatives of why the mobile medium holds some exciting opportunities for anybody working in the commercial ideas industry.
This should be easy, but the trouble is the seasoned, yet still hugely cool crooner Tony Bennett is speaking about the power of music upstairs at exactly the same time.
Can mobile compete with such fiercely credible competition?
While much of Bennett’s great music reminds us of the past, this is the very real future of advertising we’re talking about. Mobile is no longer the baby brother of the internet. There are 3.3 billion mobiles in the world today. Compare that to 1.1 billion PCs, 1.5 billion televisions, even, and suddenly in 2008 we’re talking about an un-ignorable adolescent that’s growing up fast.
Consider that, for most people the world over, a mobile is forever at arms reach and always switched on when they’re awake. This means that we can engage with consumers at any time, wherever they happen to be. Try making the same claim for any other medium.
Yet it appears that this week at this buzzing centre of the advertising world people, still waking up, are struggling to work out what to do with this little upstart. There is little representation from the mobile advertising industry at the event (some notable exceptions outstanding), and only one seminar to discuss the fact.
Certainly, agencies and brands may find it difficult to recognize the potential of mobile advertising. The mobile banner format is tricky. It would appear that there is little room for design. Less for copy.
Recognizing the benefits of the format gives you a different picture. The mobile display banner is, more often than not, the only advertisment on-screen. It can take up 20% of the display. It is a unique space – in the hand, in a small plastic box. Creatives should enjoy these unusual elements.
Something many don’t think about is that mobile is, in perspective bigger than many other screens. Next time your in front of the TV, hold up your mobile at normal arms length and you’ll realize it’s at least at big in perspective. (That is unless you have a 50” screen and sit too close to it).
What’s more mobile can fire off some powerful mechanics with more creative potential than the web: sites with imagery, video, audio, for sure, but more useful is the relevant location-based information it can offer.
It is the latter mechanic that should particularly excite creatives. If we could populate a web page with details based on exactly where you are standing, such as street-names, businesses and landmarks, imagine the stories we could tell… the games we could play…
This is just fraction of the whole picture of what mobile offers. With a consumer’s ability to send SMS and MMS to short-codes, and the onset of QR codes, the above mechanics can be fired off on a device in response to traditional media just by driving the responder onto the internet on their device. BBH in the UK proved this particularly well in their outdoor ad for the Audi R8: “Now listen to it. Text R8 to 86100”.
Mobile has the ability to make any media clickable and interactive, as if they were a web-page. The brilliant thing is we can take the interactivity that the web has given us for the last decade out into the street. The world can be your internet. Your mobile can be the cursor.
Big brands are certainly starting to embrace mobile but we need the advertising community at large to get to grips with it too.
Every creative person here at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival could benefit from understanding the rich experiences that mobile engagement adds to the traditional spaces they work in. It is not difficult concept to grasp or even implement. That is what our Nokia Ad Lab is for after all (unveiled at Cannes) – to help brands and agencies in bringing their wildest mobile ideas into being.
I’m pleased to say that Tony Bennett didn’t attract the entire festival away from our slot. I’m glad to say we had an attentive, vibrant young crowd who raised some interesting questions. Yet, for their agencies, none were working in mobile at all.
I like to think that the attendees of our class left inspired, and return to their agencies with a fresh perspective of seeing previously un-interactive media as ‘clickable’, and realizing the untapped creative potential of mobile advertising.
And I’ll bet that they were relieved we didn’t end on our planned rendition of ‘The Good Life’.
