Case Study: Content & Mobile Marketing

Last week Oracle, in partnership with United Kingdom-based trends consulting group The Future Laboratory, launched the results of the “Capitalizing on the Digital Age” study, which explores how the digital world will change consumer behavior in the future and the challenges that it will present for communications and media companies.
While the pace of change in the media and communications industry is dizzying and the shape of the digital future is uncertain, Oracle wanted to explore communications and media companies’ priorities in navigating the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
“The media industry is grappling with numerous challenges presented by the public’s digital lifestyles. Falling advertising revenues are increasing the urgency of dealing with questions such as how to capitalize on new technologies, engage new audiences and encourage consumers to pay for digital content,” said Gordon Rawling, EMEA senior marketing director for Oracle Communications. “To address these challenges, we commissioned an independent report from the Future Laboratory.”
The Future Laboratory gathered a panel of global experts – including Martin Lindstrom, author of Buyology; Hugh Garry from BBC Radio 1 Interactive and Anders Sandberg from the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford – to discuss these topics.
The panel assessed influences such as the rise of “freemium” services, the increasing professionalism of the creative consumer, and technological advances such as semantic search to build a picture of consumers’ media consumption in the next five to 10 years.
Among the phenomena predicted in the study are recommendation culture, contextual branding and emotional profiling.
Recommendation Culture: The panelists predicted that in the digital future, instead of tuning into a particular TV channel, viewers will have access to services that enable them to navigate options based on their unique preferences. Communications and media companies will also use recommendation technologies or “supertising” to tailor advertising that is relevant to specific users. Many companies are already starting to target advertising like this, and in the future, consumers will come to expect it. Further, as multi-screens allow different members of a household to watch diverse content at the same time, communications and media companies will tailor ad profiling to the individual, instead of the household.
Contextual Branding: The future will also present opportunities for contextual branding. Predictive and geospatial software will enable brands to better target consumer whims and address situational consumption. For example, technology could recognize that a person is in one place every weekday at 7 a.m. and at another one hour later. It would then deduce a morning commute and make entertainment suggestions accordingly.
Emotional Profiling: In addition to customers’ location, their feelings will play a larger role in the digital future as message design expands to include emotional profiling. As such, emotional engagement and depth of connection will replace eyeballs as the dominant trading currency in media and means of evaluating marketing effectiveness.
All of these trends point to a larger trend about consumer behavior – their increasing relaxation about their privacy. The spread of social networking sites have made people more comfortable with sharing their personal information online. In the future, users will come to realize how valuable their data is, and they will begin to expect more from content makers and media firms in return for that data.
In addition to highlighting the exciting trends expected in the future, “Capitalizing on the Digital Age” offers suggestions for communications and media companies to take advantage of these opportunities.
“ ‘Capitalizing on the Digital Age’ sheds some light on the steps that communications and media companies need to take to prosper in this future environment – for instance, building more intimate ties with their audiences and getting their systems ready to capitalize on new delivery and revenue models,” Rawling said.
Trust will be a key factor in the digital age and the key to gaining access to more profitable relationships with consumers as well as achieving competitive differentiation.
“A new digital economy is being forged – value will lie in having access to customers’ habits and desires. In exchange for this, companies will offer help to navigate the vast sea of digital choices. The only way to pull any of this off, though, is by gaining trust,” said Tom Savigar, strategy and insight director at The Future Laboratory.
The panelists also feel that media and communications companies need to become the recommender. The company that consumers turn to when navigating a bewildering sea of choice will be well-positioned to profit.
Smarter billing systems will also be important for adapting to changing revenue models and catering to micropayments and revenue-sharing models for third-party partnerships.
Finally, communications and media companies need to leverage valuable customer data. With the ability to know more about the consumer – including where they are, what they spend money on, and what content or applications they download – communications and media companies have an inherent advantage for tailoring future immersive experiences to the individual.