VIEQUES, PR — Mobile devices may dominate headlines but marketers aren’t creating enough ads for them, while accurate cross-platform measurement—with the exception of Apple, Facebook and Google—is still very much a work in progress, according to Travis Johnson, the Global President of Ansible, a unit of IPG Mediabrands. Johnson also heads mobile for IPG Mediabrands.
Johnson shared those and other observations in a keynote interview by Furious Corp. CEO and Founder Ashley J. Swartz at the 2016 Beet Retreat.
IPG wants its clients to mobilize their assets first and foremost.
“Clients just aren’t there yet. They’re still not creating the right size and enough ads even for mobile campaigns,” says Johnson. “They’re not thinking about mobile native or about creating content that can be consumed just by a mobile audience.”
Depending on the source, statistics suggest that upward of 20% of Americans use only mobile devices, according to Johnson, yet brands aren’t thinking about that.
“Looking at many companies represented here, a lot of their websites aren’t optimized for mobile. So the backyard isn’t even tidy before we get into all of this future-facing ideal state.”
Asked by Swartz whether mobile requires its own strategy in a multimedia world, Johnson said that it does because unlike the desktop and cookie universe, there are many nuances between devices, environments and operating systems.
“You need to think about mobile differently and there aren’t many people who do or are capable of doing that,” Johnson says.
Regarding the ability to effectively target cross screen rather than separating campaigns, there are only a few companies that have very accurate data to support it, according to Johnson. “It’s your Googles, your Facebooks and Apple. Those guys have the deterministic data to actually understand what is a single user doing across those different devices. Everyone else is using a bit of deterministic, scaling it with some probabilistic, adding data source A, B, C, D and E and trying to get to a unique state. But it’s actually just decreasing the accuracy along the way.”
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
