“What is the impact of mobile advertising? How do we expect it to make a change?” Questioning the technology and its ability to influence the digital platforms and lives of the mass, some of the industry experts discussed the matter on the 4th Digital Marketing Summit.
The summit engaged the local digital marketing fraternity with four global experts and shaped a knowledge sharing dais through various other segments. The theme for this year’s summit was ‘Strategy into Action’. This year’s summit was designed with four keynote sessions, three panel discussions, five breakout sessions, two case study presentations, and two insight sessions.
Following are some excerpts of the second panel discussion of the summit that focused on the topic – ‘Are we using mobile advertising effectively?’ Panelists for this panel were – Nazmul Karim Chowdhury, Senior VP & Head of Brand, The City Bank; Riyad Shahir Ahmed Husain, CEO & Managing Director, Magnito Digital; Mukit Ahmed, Head of e-Marketing, Banglalink Digital Communications Ltd; Sanjid Hossain, General Manager, Digital Advertising, Digital Services, Robi Axiata Limited; Kaymun Amin, Managing Director and CEO, Adplay Technology Limited.
Bangladesh is a mobile-first country. As of 2017, Bangladesh has over 117 million mobile phone users where more than 73% of the internet users come through the mobile phone. Mobile penetration is seeing a 25% YoY growth in terms of handset sales. 63 million of the 117 million subscribe to mobile data. We have one of the most developed telecom industries in the world; thanks to intense competition among the Telco giants.
The session was moderated by Kaymun Amin, Managing Director, and CEO, Adplay Technology Limited. He started with a brief introductory speech on the current scenario of Bangladesh. Mentioning that it is not feasible for brands to maintain the originality of content at all spheres of a brand’s lifecycle, he suggested that brands must learn to adapt contents of other entities too.
He laid the framework with a few questions for the panelists:
- What do we expect mobile marketing to do?
- And do you think you have enough technology now?
- What is the future of Adtech?
- If we have planning and execution why are we not using new types of ad formats other than everyday banner ads?
Mukit Ahmed, Head of e-Marketing, Banglalink Digital Communications Ltd.; he said, “Mobile is a vehicle to disseminate information. But are we doing it right?” Today we are sitting in front of the TV but scrolling through our mobile phone. We are seeing a paradigm shift across mobile advertising. There is a long way to go. Telecom industry is the FMCG of intangible experiences. There should be just one focus today- mobile-first approach. We need a platform where mobile leads the way of marketing.
We need to research, test and trial to know which ad formats work better and focus on them. Mr. Mukit referred to Mashable and Bright Side where ads are subtle. People interact with ads there. Ad formats and articulation are essential to digital marketing. Earlier this year Facebook experimented with different ad formats. They tried ads ranging from 5 seconds to 30 seconds in the middle of videos. Well, we all know how annoying the experience has been for users. Today, every digital marketer should concentrate on effective and targeted media buying by leveraging mobile marketing. They can discuss this type of strategy with their chosen digital marketing firm, if they have one like Frasca Digital, for example, or discuss with their in-house team on how to proceed.
One of the experts of the industry, Mr. Riyad Shahir, CEO of Magnito Digital, kicked off by referring to the constant change in industry dynamics, “Look at Tinder for example. We live in a time where people are getting married using apps.” Today, the whole industry needs a collaborative effort of the stakeholders to create more value for brands. Advertisers today must learn to monetize using the platforms people spend their times in. Initiatives like Bioscope and Banglaflix are working on bringing the television experience to the internet generation in a customized and ‘on demand’ method. Today’s marketers need to understand and learn how to monetize using these platforms. Leveraging every platform, every device, and every customer segment is unique in its own way. If you still go with mass market-mass production communication philosophy you are destined to go down. He was asked in a conference at Facebook what tools they used to create content for Facebook mobile users. Mr. Riyad replied that they use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. So does every other digital marketing agency in Bangladesh. A representative from Facebook advised them saying that’s where they were going wrong. Content for mobile should be made using mobile. Not the everyday apps we use to look fair and lovely, rather by using specialized mobile applications for agencies visualizers to create professional content for brands.
Nazmul Karim, Head of Marketing of City Bank began by dropping a bomb before even starting his speech. He said, “In 20-25 years banks won’t exist, but banking will exist.” The bankers in the summit venue must have been daydreaming a zombie apocalypse. He was asked about his expectations from digital marketing and if the technology was enough to innovate. He said, “People in the 80s would address brick and mortar branches of banks as a bank. The millennial today refers to ATMs as banks.” He pointed that we lack innovation in the banking sector. Banks today need to make the best use of technology and innovate new digital products. “Today we can push e-coupons to targeted customers using location specific technology. So yes! The technology is there,” Mr. Nazmul said. These days creative agencies are competing against digital agencies. Rather, they should be collaborating to make content good enough to make the customer watch for more than 5 compulsory seconds.
When asked about Adtech and its prospects, Sanjid Hossain; General Manager, Digital Advertising, Digital Services, Robi Axiata Ltd., answered that the roots of Adtech are analytics. Analytics is the key to targeting and locating target customers. Today we must use Adtech and data science to target and locate the most likely customer segments. “Every marketer needs to know coding today to incorporate marketing ideas with programming codes if they really want to leverage data.” In the 21st century, we need to go beyond CPMs and concentrate on CPAs.
To conclude, we may jot down the following points that will direct us to utilize mobile marketing effectively:
- Create content using the professional mobile software. Innovate new products tailored to the audience’s needs. And run a third-party biometrics test to make sure it is functioning how it should be for all phone platforms.
- No one likes to be sold, create content that is subtle and entertaining. Test, trial to see what works best, what makes our thumbs stop while scrolling through our home page.
- Get the data, use the data, monetize on the data by marketing in places where your target group spends more time, locations where target groups are more concentrated, content your target group cares about.
