Mobile FirstLook Strategy 2014 Ad Agencies: Defining Their Role in a Rapidly-Evolving, Mobile-Influenced Advertising and Marketing Environment

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1 Mobile FirstLook Strategy 2014 Ad Agencies: Defining Their Role in a Rapidly-Evolving, Mobile-Influenced Advertising and Marketing Environment Chia Chen, Senior Vice President and North American Mobile Practice Lead, DigitasLBi Richard Ting, Executive Vice President and Global Executive Creative Director, R/GA Patrick Frend, President, Razorfish

2 Ad Agencies: Defining Their Role in a Rapidly-Evolving, Mobile- Influenced Advertising and Marketing Environment Chia Chen Senior Vice President and North American Mobile Practice Lead DigitasLBi Richard Ting Executive Vice President and Global Executive Creative Director R/GA Patrick Frend President Razorfish

3 How mobile has changed the agency s relationship with clients and its role in the advertising and marketing process Mobile is not just a channel, it is a technology-driven shift in consumer behaviors and attitudes. That has made clients look to agencies - among others - for more ongoing collaboration and innovation that blends technology savvy and human insights. Mobile is the main consumer connection for most brands today, and the channel is responsible for an overwhelming majority of digital products and services that consumers are using on a daily basis. Clients are increasingly looking to agencies to create new and valuable mobile products and services for their consumers. This shift has made some agencies resemble product development shops, but it s also opened the door for exploration toward new, creative ways to connect with consumers. Mobile has forced digital to be front and center, because of its ability to simultaneously disrupt and complement other channels. It has also strengthened the relationships where it is in play. For a lot of our B2B clients, mobile is becoming an important extension of their communication and collaboration platforms with employees and partner communities, as well as a powerful toolset for sales enablement. For many of our B2C clients, the needs and the opportunities vary broadly.

4 Who owns mobile within the agency? Although there is a mobile practice, in reality everyone is responsible for mobile. We see no difference between mobile and digital, starting last year. The DigitasLBi mobile practice is accountable for making sure that everyone is capable of being responsible. Right now, mobile is, and must be, distributed within the agency. Mobile is too big and too fundamental to every client and project to keep it completely siloed. However, we still carry mobile specialists within our mobile group at R/GA, for the sole purpose of ensuring that the larger agency continues to be at the forefront of what s happening in the channel. We also have experts and thought leaders in seamless commerce, product development, mobile application design and responsive design. Having these specialists on staff allows us to quickly educate clients and the larger agency on bleeding edge topics. We think about it in a couple of ways: first, it is everyone s job. Mobile is too ubiquitous and disruptive to live in a single discipline or in some small pocket of the agency. And yet, it is different and it requires some level of specialization. So we ve got a dedicated mobile practice made up of mobile SMEs from all of our core disciplines and a team of senior leaders operating as executive sponsors. The mobile practice brings a deep level of knowledge in all mobile channels which complement existing client teams detailed knowledge of the brand and audience.

5 How the creative development and media planning and buying have changed, along with mobile s intersection with multichannel campaigns The insights and concepts now revolve around the fact that, for most people, digital connections are mobile. Mobile has many nuances, so you cannot expect to just flip a switch and think you re immediately an expert in the medium. It is too easy to try to copy patterns and behaviors from an old medium and bring them into mobile, but it does not work. GUI patterns, feature sets, user behavior patterns, and display ad units all need to be re-imagined specifically for mobile. We also see the very definition of mobile already changing. The distinction between desktop and mobile is starting to blur as almost everything we work on today is multichannel, but considered first through the lens of mobile. We also have to remember that smartphones reached an astonishing 58% of the addressable market in the U.S. in only 3 years. While mobile will reach saturation in the next few years, we still have to look at it as a very young, immature medium. We are just at the beginning, but this is when it gets interesting. Mobile, even as a discrete media channel, magnifies that need for collaboration. We know that consumers have a very unique relationship with their mobile devices in the sense that they are personal, they are always with you and the experience is highly tactile. These characteristics make the mobile creative what you say and show as well as the mobile media units where and how you show it more tightly coupled than other channels. On the media side, mobile continues the theme of multichannel fragmentation and has introduced all kinds of new measurement and targeting challenges that are going to take time to sort out. Even simple things like trying to figure out unduplicated reach across channels remain challenging and inconsistent.

6 What clients are saying about mobile and what that means for agencies, media and service providers Clients really want to understand how to pivot into a mobile-at-the-core approach for all of their programs and campaigns. Clients want to know how to express their brands as software to build better connections to their customers in the world of always-on connectivity. For us, it means integrating insights about consumer behavior with technology know-how to enable brands to really connect in the mobile era. We see clients actively discussing fundamentals such as display advertising, programmatic buying, mobile web (responsive web), mobile app strategy and creative production and integrated campaigns. Then, we see clients interested in some of the newer areas in mobile such as wearables and connected devices, seamless commerce and micro-location based experiences. Lastly, we see clients eager to create transformative mobile products and services like Instagram, Pandora, Uber, and Nike+ Fuelband. Clients are very excited about the promise of mobile and increasingly with the results they are experiencing. They re asking for more, and asking us to help build the business cases for increased focus and investment. If done well, mobile experiences create a new way to connect with their customers and consumers and connect in a very personal space. However, there are still a lot of variables and unknowns that they need help understanding and navigating. New technologies and new devices are being introduced all the time adding to both possibility and risk. The opportunity is to be a trusted advisor in separating noise from signal, and bringing creative and differentiating solutions to them.