Article: The Future of Marketing

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Part of our job as marketers is to keep a close eye on the current trends and theories as well as the coming technology and innovations in an attempt to predict what the future holds for advertising.

Admittedly, this process is often futile as progress can be very unpredictable. However, admitting this doesn’t stop us from trying – we’re not always wrong by any means.

So, what are we currently predicting?

Top of the list at the moment is the continuing of inroads into personalisation of advertising using mobile phone technology.

The mobile phone market is one of the most wide-ranging and rich consumer markets in the world. These tiny pieces of tech are owned by enormous numbers of people across all demographics.

When this obvious but hugely important fact is coupled with another obvious but hugely important fact – that these are communications devices – it is possible to build up a viable idea of how the future may be shaping up.

Mobiles are marketed as lifestyle accessories (and, bizarrely, not as phones at all…) and are, by their very nature, consistently on hand to their owners. It’s hard to imagine a more accurate description of a captive audience.

So, the audience are in place…how do we use this knowledge to market to them? Well, given the ever more stringent laws surrounding invasion of privacy – and the constantly developing understanding of and crackdown on spam – we, as marketers, have to be very careful not to overstep the mark.

This makes collecting user data from mobile phone companies and using it for marketing purposes a route that shouldn’t be taken – if not illegal it tends to alienate the intended recipient and that, of course, is the last thing we want.

Consequently we are of the opinion that any marketing done in this fashion will have to be opt-in – whether by email, text or other method. Indeed, we’re seeing the beginnings of this kind of market already and “text this number to find out more” is becoming an ever more common sight.

However, we do not believe that this is as far as the market can, or will, go. In fact, in Japan a new and revolutionary campaign is about to begin.

Shochiku Studios is generating a lot of buzz by advertising the new Nicholas Cage action film Next on mobile phones. Having announced that they would be showing special preview screenings to a select audience chosen by lottery (a common enough way of whipping up interest) they have gone on to state that the film will be shown to these winners exclusively by transmission to their mobile phones.

Aside from generating comment from all over the world (and promoting the film obviously) this campaign serves to draw attention to additional phone content available through a Shochiku subsidiary that specialises in full-length, made-for-cellphone movies.

This kind of campaign would have been unthinkable only a couple of years ago, but the leaps and bounds in hi-res displays and other phone technology as well as the advent of cheap broadband and unlimited bandwidth access make it possible now.

However, we’re sure this is only the beginning – the next few years will see further enormous leaps. That’s why this is an area we will continue to watch very, very carefully.

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