CMOs on Mobile Data, Audiences, and Ads

This year we are bringing together groups of CMOs who are winning in the mobile economy for our global CMO Connect series. These selected CMOs are leading their organizations with clear vision and bold innovation and are ready to share their insights with other CMOs and marketers who are looking to stay ahead of the curve.

In our latest CMO Connect conversation, we hosted a discussion with three CMOs to share insights on their mobile media mix, how they reach audiences across every platform, and how they actualize their investment in mobile.

ICYMI — the full transcript is now available below:

Investing Across Platforms

Peter: So, we’ve really got a panel of CMOs of CMOs to some extent. You’re advising other CMOs. Sometimes, the CMO is a customer of yours who’s maybe buying all your platforms. You’re working with these companies to help them grow their business, whether small or large. So, I think this is the perspective all of us should be thinking about as we’re going through this panel and I want to start a very high level with the platforms themselves. So, we have mobile web, stuff that happens in a browser. Then we have the native experience and the applications on IOS and Android. We want to know from each of you, how you think of these as different platforms for doing different things? How do you also connect them maybe? Are there some experiences where you start out in a web environment, and you parlay that into a more long term app experience? How are you thinking about maybe investing these things yourself? And how do you think other CMOs should be thinking about investing in these things?

Josh: For Daily Mail, it’s a newspaper legacy company. It is newsstand to subscriber, if you will. So, if the mobile web is somewhat of the mobile access that we have and the mass, the obsessed audience, the super served audience in the app. I wouldn’t necessarily say that we have a position that is strong, that we truly want to serve the reader where they are, how they do it. But, it goes back to, and I know it’s been mentioned before, but it’s really about the velocity and how we basically change it is in the navigation. We want to make this as easy to use as possible. So there’s a difference how we look at mobile web versus desktop and desktop versus app, is that we want to make the navigation and the way that people look and feel when they go through the different experience. As seamless as possible. You know, we talk about it in terms of brands and how they look at that, from a monetization standpoint, you know we have a saying. If it’s going to make anyone download the app blocker, don’t do it. That has its challenges. So we think about it from a brand monetary division, or river brands. It’s really about trying to, I think, personalize that navigation. Make it specifically where there is ownership of a specific article, say if a brand wanted to own everything coming out on the Olympics, which in those two some odd weeks, we probably do three to four hundred different articles of different ways on the Olympics, and you can phone, and personalize your navigation. We created units powered by CellTrek to personalize it, make it relevant and make the experience better. I think the biggest difference between desktop and mobile and the app, is you have these very cognizant, more so than on desktop, and suddenly now TVs, of user experience. Both as publishers, you’re trying to maintain an audience in that. There’s too much canalization, too easy to delete, to never come back.

Sonny: I think of a good Wayne Gretzky blurb, which is a good hockey player plays where the puck is, the great one plays where the puck is going to be. So, for us mobile web, desktop, tablet, I want to be where the customer is going to be and our customer base flips every 16 months. So, we’re not playing the attention game. I do want people to get married once, and then we are done with that.

Peter: The point about statistics backstage a little bit, right?

Sonny: The point is I want to be where that next set of customers are going to be. Looking at our stats, desktop is about a 40% slow decline. Tablet is declining 25% a year. Right now, for our business, mobile web is growing and mobile app is up 535%. So, we definitely invest where our traffic is moving. At the same time, native app versus mobile web solves different problems for us. I have 35 million pages on my mobile website. I need to get indexed. I need to get more traffic. If I rate 35 million pages in my app, we talked about it pushed us to number one. So, when we’re creating app experiences, it’s about getting the best app ratings, the user experience. But, I use mobile web to pull in the traffic from an SEO perspective.

Marta: In a different way for what we do is what we want to do is make sure the experience for the brand and that consumer really easy. So, a call to action we may do with an app, or something that’s going to be providing information that people can use nimbly, we absolutely will encourage our brands, or kind of the programs to have an app component to it. And, I’ll give you an example of an app that was really cool that we did on behalf of Citi and the Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones wanted to do an app. Citi became a sponsor of the app, but in that user experience if you were a Citi card member and downloaded the app, at the “50 and Counting Tour”, you could vote on the last song the Rolling Stones would sing. So, it brought it to a very interesting real life experience and it was an organic experience on behalf of the brand, but it was something that people didn’t forget, and in a way, we look at web, it’s kind of the point. It’s kind of repository, we use it almost as kind of a hub. But, less and less are we doing that because one of the things that’s happening with mobile technology, especially across different demographics and when brands want to go cross generationally, as well as they want to go through different, kind of multi-cultural kind of elements, the phone is in some ways a lot of people’s computer. It’s really almost offers the same services for different folks as a desktop. So, in some ways, it’s kind of prioritizing, like how do we want to utilize that user experience and how does the brand want to communicate and who are they trying to reach.

Peter: Since you guys are pushing kind of content, and social, and engagement, all of these different platforms, certainly it’s hard for you to get your app on everyone’s phone. So, there’s a little difficult there in reaching the entire audience. And that sort of brings to the table these platforms, right? These platforms that are sort of cut across. Most of them are social, primarily. You’ve got Facebook, obviously. Everyone wakes up in the morning and starts going through their feed. You’ve got Snapchat, Twitter. How do you think about these platforms playing a role as your content creators, yourselves, and you distribute that content on your own platforms. Yet, there’s also a lot of curation that these players are doing, and you can also host that content through them. What does that mean for your business and how do you navigate that strategically?

Josh: We do love Apple, but it is a challenge to drive additional app usage without the app store ranking you number one out of the top 10, which you know, happens on occasion. But, it is a challenge to maintain. So, really platforms are our bread and butter and we were an alpha punter for Snapchat Discover, Facebook, Google App, Apple Music.

Josh: Daily Mail is number one most engaged on Snapchat, Top 25 completion. No, but it’s an important point in how we look at Snapchat specifically. All partnerships, what we do is basically look at it through three very standard premises. One is, are we cannibalizing in on our audience. It’s a delicate battle. We do it in a way that is native to the platform itself and is still a positive user experience. That’s not an easy question to answer is what kind of staffing, that’s the reality of it. How many news desks do we have to build, to create the amount of content. Going back to that North Star velocity, we have to create content and a lot of it, not something we can repurpose. So, it does cost those legitimate P & L there. And, can we monetize them? Are we going to see any P & L? Are we going to see some profits on that? So, to Snapchat, we have a 10 person news desk that sole life, if you will, is creating our snaps. That’s let us, even though we are, I think, a US brand now over the last few years, we build ourselves up by going into it. We’re next to the bytowns and the ESPNs of the world, very US centric brands. We are in the top 25 percent of completion and also of loyalty, coming back 5-7 times per month. It’s because we dedicate our resources to the platform and we don’t look at it as something we were acquiring an audience, but we’re adding an audience. We don’t look at Snapchat where we’re taking the 18-24, and obviously the older generations that are flocking to Snapchat as well, but predominantly they’re 18-24. But we need them to come download the app, we need them to come to the Daily Mail on an operating. We look at it as this is our Snapchat audience, and we’re serving our Snapchat audience. I think it’s a very important distinction between how we create for the other platforms versus, say Snapchat, and that goes also for Facebook and the others.

Peter: Not acquiring an audience, but adding an audience. I thought that was a really interesting way to think about it. Sonny, in particular, you know you guys publish a lot on Facebook. It’s a major channel for you. How do you think about leveraging it fully versus posting it in your own app, especially with all the app growth that you have had. How do you think about your relation?

Sonny: So, we’re at the pace where one out of every two engaged people in the US will download our app during the planning cycle. I want to make sure that’s one out of one. We look at an equation, which is acceleration, engagement, and sentiment. So, three pieces of the equation to get to number one rankings in the app store, which we have across our terms. So, rations how do I boost download volume, get people in the door, engage those loyalty rates, making sure those people stick and send in the reviews that people have. Ultimately, I think each of the channels solve different pieces of that equation and I think, when we think about Facebook, we’ve invested a lot of our money and we’ve shifted our budget very rapidly to Facebook, and the whole piece is that it has helped us in an acceleration standpoint in terms of very efficient downloads. We can get someone in our app for some $4 and we can boost that from week to week to make sure that we’re maintaining our rankings. Ultimately, it’s about what content we’re sharing on Facebook or Snapchat that can pull people back into our ecosystem. So, we test everything from Facebook Live, Facebook 360, the new Facebook Canvas format has worked really well, which is telling the brand’s story and it still drives action. So, we;re having testers. We will be the first to test everything on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat to pull people in the door. I don’t care what channel it’s from. I rank them against each other. So, Snapchat is fighting against my dollars to facebook, or time where we’d spend.

Marta: Yeah, we use them a lot of times. Two things, one which is we always invest and for our program the investment for creating a content is pretty hefty, so how do we make sure it gets seen and it drives an engagement on behalf of the brand, because otherwise, why do it? The other role that it plays, which is kind of interesting is that that it almost anchors a platform. So, a lot of times, as we think about events and live events for our brand, we try to extend it for a four to six week window and lot of times these channels play platform where we can have multiple engagements. So, I don’t know, one of the notable examples was, I don’t know if a lot of you have seen the Coca-Cola NCAA example where they used Shazam and you could interact with the advertising, you would interact with the billboards. Now, they’ve gone further in some ways, say for CBG, you can have something an event, add retail, create kind of something to do with advertising so a lot of us have thought of that investment. So, if you kind of anchor that with a promotion of some sort of value, you’re making those dollars and that visibility work that much further and you can actually showcase different things, whether it’s product innovation, product experience, to be able to drive taste off of it or to actually put somebody and actually make them feel like they’re inside of a car is not easy to do. So, it’s one of the things of how do you take those partnerships’ experiences and actually invite millions to be a part of it versus hundreds of thousands.

Peter: I’m going to switch gears just a little bit. Mobile has been a little bit of a different experience as it didn’t really pick up just sort of on pure brand and engagement alone. The whole economy built off of purchases and advertising, and suddenly there was an economy around this whole thing sort of happening around the end of 2012. We didn’t have a business before that stuff sort of started happening because marketers weren’t spending dollars in the mobile channel because dollars weren’t really coming out yet. So, now there is a mobile economy and I want to talk a little bit about monetization as it relates to mobile. What are, how do you think about monetization and, sort of the strategic that falls that might be there, or the things you would give advice to others that are trying to monetize these mobile audiences? Maybe start down at the end with Sonny.

Sonny: Sure, for us, where we’re seeing the big shift is personalization around our consumer journey. So, on desktop across our products, we saw social integrations to display to email. But, it’s targeting a group of people, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, a million people at a time. What we’re moving towards is the people take different actions in their 16 month engagement and how do we actually really personalize that experience so we’re creating new ad products personalized to it. So, the first thing when you open up our app is we ask you for your wedding date and we do the stupid countdown with a nice photo and it counts down to your wedding. The whole point is, I’m actually asking you questions as you go through the experience, such as have you booked your venue, have you done this other thing, and within your feed we are actually personalizing directly to you. So, very much Facebook sort of strategy is what we’re starting to apply to our business and it’s done great for Facebook mobile monetization. I hope to be somewhat successful.

Peter: Marta, as you’re working with brands how often is this coming up? Like, okay it’s great that you’re doing all these things, but what is the monetization part of it?

Marta: I think as coming from a different, almost it’s not so much of a monetization, but having investment dollars go further. So, actually saving and spend. So, I think it’s building off of kind of being able to know what people want to do so you can actually reinvest your dollars and understand what that means. The other piece that is actually impacting us real time is that mobile is allowing some of these platforms to track events as they are happening. So, for example, we can track what people’s user experiences are, say within a music festival and a brand has an activation, we can actually see how many people are activating or not and we can change things real time if we’re not driving the engagement they want. So, I would say it’s not monetizing, but it’s almost leveraging and maximizing the investment dollars and in some ways that is a bit of a monetization because before, some of those dollars were going the way of it didn’t work, it didn’t work. Here, it’s in some ways, it’s driving and ensuring that ROI. It’s not only the return on investment, but it’s also a return on that engagement that is actually helping monetize. What happens is the statistics we have is 93% who interact with a brand at the event will recommend, who have a positive experience, will recommend to a family or friend. 83% say they are going to be interested in purchasing the product. So, that’s where that monetization actually comes in for what we do and getting smarter at using mobile and using some of those data analytics.

Peter: Getting that data back.

Marta: Yeah, can help drive just that monetization on behalf of those brands.

Peter: Josh, as a pure play publisher in the most sense of the word, how are you guys thinking about monetization and growth on that side?

Josh: Every day. I don’t think we’re doing as well, this is industry wide, as we need to, honestly, with the audience transition moving 65%. Given month to month, of my money it’s willing to be mobile. We are thinking it’s mobile first and I think as we put this together, we realize, and I don’t shy away from this standard either, progomatic or display units on mobile are pretty horrible. Any creative director in their right mind is thinking I’m going to create mobile sticky ads and they’re not great. So, when you think about it, in terms of how do we get the message across, I mentioned and touched on kind of owning that addition. We created that unit, it’s called Story Blaster, as I mentioned. It’s mobile first and again, just to reiterate, that’s owning a specific event, via Fashion Week. I think the next step, and we have the ability to do this, is we understand what people are talking about in a relevant, vertical, again Fashion Week, talking about specific shows, specific dress, and specific trends. We are informed by that. Then what we need to do better, and working with brands better. We do this on occasions with brands who play ball with us and can work fast enough with us in real time conversation, insert native, for lack of better term. Some people in the audience might cringe when I say native, but it still is relevant. Insert native into the conversation in real time. So turn it around in 24-48 hours when Fashion Week is still relevant, the Olympics is still relevant, and then not just saying this is about Fashion Week or the Olympics or red carpet or politics, or anything else. But, talking about and touching on the specific trend of conversation that plays into the brand new jacket, as well as what everyone wants. Really, it falls back to the user experience, the Snapchat, the Facebook examples of when we look at platforms. Mobile especially, we don’t do it in a way, we try to avoid it, in a way where everyone’s going to download an ad blocker. We want to be additive and we do content. That’s what we do best. So, we work with brands and we ask them to trust us to know our audience as best as can. Nobody knows their demos better than the brands, but they’re going to look to specific publishers to help them expand upon that demo, reach them in an authentic fashion, to trust both us and, I guess publish if you’re going to speak for them. Make it happen as close to real time as possible because that’s going to render the best bang for your buck. That’s how you’re going to deliver the most ROI on your spend.

 

Peter: You know, putting all this stuff together for a CMO must be pretty challenging, obviously from an operational perspective, but also the insides and the data everything you sort of got coming in from the publisher, the publishing side going out, the monetization side. How are you guys doing with this today? What are maybe some of the tools, the point solutions that are maybe helping you pull it together? How do you think about the team, or teams, or people within teams that are solving that problem for you? Pulling all the data together, making sense.

Josh: I’ll use a specific example of how we use, say, Facebook live, and again we look at it in terms of dynamic, real time, going back to trying to catch the conversation with the 1,200 pieces of content. So we don’t necessarily plan our Facebook live. We look at, sure we look at real-time analytics with proprietary analysis. We look at Facebook data on the dashboard and we see what’s popping. That’s not just Daily Mail. That’s across.

Peter: So you’re sort of looking at the relationship of those?

Josh: Correct, and I’ll give you a story. A few weeks ago, last–around 10 days ago I think, we had a former executive chef of Buckingham Palace. It is the Daily Mail, the royals do play very well. It was an article about what the Queen used to have for breakfast. She does like corn flakes. I realized you had breakfast like the Queen. Basically, this popped. It had a phenomenal reader engagement, the comments were huge, the engagement was huge. So, we basically very quickly ran down the hall, went to our royal expert desk if you will, and everyone said go live, and we basically, literally went Facebook live and in 10 minutes we had the royal expert, the former chef on Skype. I’m not going to say this is a clever kind of high end production, but it was done quickly and it doesn’t matter. It was relevant to the platform and if you look at Snapchat, what we do, it’s a different kind of tangent, it’s a different animal. Very well produced for that platform. Every snap, every top snap has motion, sound. Everything is very much specific, everything is vertical obviously. Facebook live is a different game. I think and we believe that it’s about volume, that it’s about relevancy and speed. That plays a part, too, it’ll come up. But, it’s all fueled idea. So, it’s really all matter in the different dashboards and different platforms. From a staffing standpoint, we have an audio science team in house that helps. We have pretty much everyone that is trained to have our TA board up at all times because it’s so fast, you have to pop it and you have to catch it when it happens. So, I wouldn’t say that I have a specific staffing plan, but it is certainly a priority across the board.

Sonny: So we use Google Universal Analytics. We try to track in a lot of different places, Facebook, etc. Also, what we’ve done is we built a data science team, along with the engineers, sat them all together and built our own database that we can extract knowledge out of. That feeds into Tableau and other things we can use to seminate that information across the market team, across sales. I’d say what has worked really well is we have defined the value of every single action on our site. So, if you submit a lead to a venue or you sign up for a registry, I have a value for every single thing, and then dependent on every entry point on our site, I have your lifetime value. So, if you sign up for a wedding website, you sign up for our app, I know exactly how valuable you are as a user to us. So, for instance, our app user is 2x the value of our regular registered user. I know that an Android user is about 14% less valuable than a IOS user. So, what we do is actually change our spend and marketing tactics based on all that information. But, it’s ingesting that information from different sources, but really giving it to our data science team to find the magic.

Peter: We have any questions right now for the panel?

Audience:   How are you using location data, or how would you like to use location data?

Sonny: Right now we use location data which makes sense, which is we have 300,000 businesses in the US so we pull back your city, along with the venue, the photographer, the caterer, whatever may be in your market. Ultimately, what I would want to get to is I would like to be able to connect that location data with you as a customer, if you’re an app user. When you walk into that venue and I will check that my lead just got delivered as an actual person, without doing it actively, without the user having to take an action. Data would passively connect the dots between offline and online. I think that’s our next step from a location standpoint.

Marta: And we use it quite a bit obviously, because it impacts especially with some of the geofencing and geotargeting, to really drive different messaging to different folks for different opportunities. These are kind of like statistics, our kind of difference. These are the fun factoids of pop culture, but on average, people drive, travel 900 miles to a music festival. 32 million people go to a music festival, obviously 16 million of those millennials, but there’s a lot of non millennials going. So, for us, it’s almost more of how do we actually use some of those kind of geographic opportunities to provide different offers and values and actually kind of provide people the kind of content they’re looking for and kind of customize the content we’re producing. One of the things that we’ve used kind of with our brands and our customers with regard to planning festival activations are, there’s over a million people at any given time during a big Music Festival that are suffering FOMO, fear of missing out. They want to see what’s going on and so we kind of help and we kind of suggest to our brand partners to curate the content that they’re going to be putting out just because they’ll make a difference of what people want to see kind of depending on how close or not close they are. So, I think it’s changing what we do dramatically.

Peter: Certainly from a targeting perspective, right? How about you guys? What do you do with proximity location?

Josh: First of all I think that’s why Snapchat started specifically. It worked so well, it’s specific. I wish I was there, but to answer your question, I think we’re in the early stages. We are partnered with, we are having conversations, and we have moved forward with some geotargeting partners, really specific for our advertisers and brands, too, who have quite honestly proved the effectiveness of advertising and showcasing foot traffic for those in those categories. Where I’d like to be, it all goes back to UX and personalization. All business is local if you will, and I think there is a way that you can change the navigation. That’s a tangled web, specifically because of the way that our CMS is structured is and because it’s an editorial first based on a mass, and frankly it’s points that we update our site 97 times a day based on the data and moving things, and that’s at scale. But I think that probably, in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to have both relevants overlapping at a scale perspective of what’s kind of popping on a national or global basis, but also personalized specifically. Geotargeting is just one of the personalizations.

Sonny: That other thing we want to get better at is multi-location, which is we just assume that the user is in the same, but often they’re planning in a different city. They’re planning and collaborating with three other people in seven different marketing. So, how do you really get good at understanding the user lives in one place, works in another place, and actually does the planning in a third place? I wouldn’t say that we are anywhere close to getting that really right. I think there’s a lot of value to be credited.

Audience:   Given that mobile has changed in your business, from the highest order of brand strategy and brand, has mobile changed the way you attack brand. Second question is as agency selection, so traditional agency versus digital, so has that changed your influence into your brand?

Marta: I would say yes absolutely. We were talking about this backstage as it was interesting to watch Mercedes basically launched and you product and put a new car into the marketplace using Facebook and Instagram as kind of their platform to launch it with no TV. It’s kind of that’s how it’s definitely changing. I do think that people are using, I think you almost need to use more specialized, depending on the results you want if you are going to need to use specialized agencies to kind of be able to get there. Because they are far more aware and have the relationship and the partnerships of being able to deliver unique and organic and valuable experiences.

Josh: So we shot 6 commercials last year and we started to push them to our media agency relationships. The whole plan was to mix it with social, with online video, which full episode players in our industry, amongst women in their mid twenties does very well. If you want to watch Scandal, you’ll have to watch my commercial. It works pretty well. And then we want to mix in TV on a local basis as well, so we’ve run tests on a number of markets and what we found is we have slowly just started to shift almost all of our effort to Facebook and Instagram from where we’re actually pushing our brand campaigns. I think in terms of the execution. So, we shot 6 of these, the ones that were focused with the social audience, are the ones that tend to form the best. So, we think about evolving our agency selection, that is going to be at the top of our priority list.

Marta: I think it also allows you to tell the story because what TV was, it’s a 30 second sound bite, where now you’re watching a lot of brands develop content that are two minutes long and people are watching it, or a minute and a half long. Some things are going down to 15 seconds, but there’s other elements that I think are going into a longer story and people are actually willing to watch it if it’s engaging.

Josh: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. So, our six executions, it was focused on TV. I have 30 seconds and 60 seconds. Since then, we’ve created much more customer testimonials and we’ve created three minute, four minute videos. Those actually perform much better on social. So, it’s not about fifteen’s and thirties. It’s about creating a story, and I think it takes an agency a different skill set to be able to pull that off. I think that’s looking at it from a different perspective, not necessarily from a consumer standpoint, for (unclear), you know if I am a brand CMO, I am basically saying I understand-if I’m talking to myself, talking to publishers, talking to platforms-, I understand that to be the most effective, you need to be relevant to your audience, the platform you’re on. I think it creates specific content and execute it. Quite honestly, that’s your problem, not mine. I have a certain amount of money I have to spend on creating product and creating creative, and I have to be effective. So, I think quite honestly, working with certain brands who understand that flexibility, and understand the availability of creating specific content for different platforms and focusing on those platforms, is incredibly important. So, like I said, nobody knows their audience better than the brands, nobody knows their consumer better than the brands. They have to find the publishers that work, find the platforms that work, and then stick within the budget. Create content with those platforms and not be everywhere. I think the challenge, the biggest challenge from the mobile space is the abundance. It’s very challenging to, it’s very easy to lose focus. That’s from my perspective and that’s very important as a publisher to hopefully hone in that focus for the brand.

Peter: How do you think about collecting this proximity information?

Josh: I think, the answer is we always are. The challenge we have is, it goes back to the amount of content we produce. So, if it’s not relevant, honestly if it’s not clicked in two hours, it’s off the site. So, we look at a lot of the information that we capture from an audience standpoint. We try to capture it by a specific mass audience segment that we believe is going to play off specific content to. But, I don’t think that, as I’ve said before, we’re not in the game of being creepy. We’re in the game of serving content and providing specific segments of audiences through loading and other tools we have and understanding those segmentations to what type of content and context they want to read. That’s how we provide a service. So, you know, it doesn’t enhance us to dive so deep. The audience tells us what they want to read. If they’re not reading it, it’s off the site, we produce another five hundred more. That’s really the game that we play. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s how we look at it.

Peter: This is predominantly first party data. These are folks who you have a direct relationship with and you’re trying to optimize that experience based on their location.

Sonny: Yeah, we look at it as quantity versus quality, right? So, we’re able to track a ton of data and that’s improving the overall setting experiences, for the most part, for all users that come. And anytime that we are pushing registration, we’re asking questions. I look at that as the quality of information we’re getting is much better typically than just doing cookie tracking. That is where we then start to personalize the experience, where we start to actually change what’s happening. So, I think both are valuable, which is the quantity play, looking at what’s happening with site flow. But, the quality play on our side is really important. What we’ve found is that we tend to have this hesitation to ask too many questions. We’ve found that if asked in a small bite sized way, users are very willing to continue to give information. We don’t want to come to you with a big form with 42 questions to fill out, but over the course of a couple of months, I can probably get those 42 fields.

Peter: Well, we’re going to wrap up with just one more advice to the audience, actually some advice for the CMO’s to other CMO’s about how is it you should be thinking about your brand strategy as it relates to mobile? What is the thing that you really need to keep in mind? What would be the top advice you give? We’ll start down on the end.

Sonny: As a marketer in general, our tools are constantly changing, but the job of what we’re trying to solve has stayed the same. That simply means that we lived in a world 10 years ago without social media and we lived in a world without mobile revolution. I think what’s coming next is this concept of device connection and machine connection. I think as marketers we will have to continue to evolve and that means we will have to market to people on their cars and in their homes and in a lot of different places. Mobile is the cool thing and it will continue to be because everybody is on it, but the rapid acceleration, I think we’re through a lot of that period and we need to be ready for what’s next. The second thing that I would just say, which is a little controversial is, as a marketer to really do well in mobile, I think you really should just assume that desktop does not exist at all. And that doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable. We monetize from desktop, but if you are going to be ready for what your business needs to do and take that next step, I’d assume that desktop’s not a piece of business.

Peter: Bold claim, bold statements.

Marta: I think it’s still about value, kind of building on what Sonny had said which is, it’s still about what’s in it for me and what kind of content. I think what’s happened is how quickly we want more content has changed the dynamics of that relationship we have. If you think about it, if it’s not clicked on in two hours, it’s gone. We’re kind of insatiable and when you think about some thing’s got 7 to 8 million views, but that happens within a one week period and then nobody else goes to it, it’s almost totality when people write things off. So, it’s really about the value and what’s in it for me and what’s in it for them because I think we can’t forget about that. I think that principle kind of anchors all that we do.

Josh: Sonny was baiting me with that. Desktop has it’s place amongst CTO’s, honestly if that’s what you were getting at. But, from a mobile standpoint my feeling is again, being additive, trying not to on your audience or your brand. It’s very easy to have negative connotation on mobile, much more so, we’re just trained from a desktop standpoint to either ignore or otherwise click away without really, I think the folks who will tell you not that many repercussions from a desktop, or a TV standpoint might be changing. But, from mobile, there are massive repercussions with having a negative brand or a negative ad experience. So, really for me it goes back to go for the platform you’re on, build for the audience that you’re wanting to reach, understand that going into it. Try not to be everywhere and repurpose. I don’t think that makes any much sense. I would, if I was a brand going mobile, I would be looking at it as content more top mid funnel, the conversion. I still believe the conversion can happen. I think the studies from e-commerce, or content to commerce are talking about, it’s a little bit a channel, instead of having direct correlation, but I do believe that there is still a problem when you think about going to e-commerce and doing a conversion. There’s just a lot of lead commerce that needs to be optimized. It really comes down to the fact that I have to put my credit card in and it’s just a very bad experience. So, if I was a brand thinking about that and depending on where I was in the funnel, I’d be making sure I’m going to a very mobile optimized, small one click, two click experience as possible because that’s how you use your phones.

Peter: It’s an ugly and bad experience and it’s right here in your face. It’s just magnified.

Peter: I just want you guys to put your hands together for the amazing panel.

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