One of the bigger anomalies in the digital world is the time that people spend on mobile devices versus the less than 15% of digital ad dollars that are being devoted to mobile. The CEO of WPP Group-owned Medialets attributes this largely to people trying to use desktop computer tools for mobile campaigns.
“It’s a lot of confusion in the marketplace today,” Richy Glassberg said in an interview with Beet.TV. “The problem is most people don’t understand how to use mobile tools and they’re trying to apply desktop tools to a mobile attribution. Desktop advertising doesn’t work in mobile.”
A side effect of this phenomenon is that without being able to properly track view-through attributions on mobile, some agencies and marketers tend to look at the broader picture.
“It’s also driving the push to cross platform,” said Glassberg. “Because people think mobile is too hard they’re saying, ‘Let’s just see what happens across the whole spectrum of attribution or conversion metrics.’”
Founded in 2008 and acquired last year by WPP, Medialets has compiled some two dozen case studies showing that a mobile-specific ad server can capture “anywhere from 17X to 73X more attributions…actual conversions with a transaction ID and a receipt from the marketer than a desktop tool does,” Glassberg said.
That represents step number one for Glassberg. “Step two is let’s see how people really use their phones. You may see that ad and go back at night and convert on desktop.” Documenting such transactions will be “the next big leap forward.”
Being owned by a goliath like WPP has enabled Medialets to expand its operations from slightly more than 50 countries to approximately 90, including its recent foray in Asia-Pacific with a new base in Singapore. That’s pretty straightforward compared with educating the advertising and media world on the best way to engage with mobile-enabled consumers.
“The battle is how do you shift budgets to where viewership is,” Glassberg noted. “We’ve seen this in the beginning of cable and we’ve seen it in the beginning of video. It’s happening again in mobile.”
