Brands don't need an app to reach consumers

Thu, 4 Mar 2010 | By Justin Pearse

So it was good to see O2 media chief Shaun Gregory take the high-profile opportunity of this week’s FT digital media conference to hammer home the message.

As we reported this week, Gregory expressed concern that in meetings with agencies and brands, the conversation immediately jumped to apps.

The hype around apps may be justified in terms of the user experience and their potential to drive take-up of mobile content. But their users remain a subset of the overall mobile population.

And that mobile population is getting more thirsty for content. A survey this week from the European Interactive Advertising Association found people spending more time browsing the mobile internet, an average of 6.4 hours a week, compared with reading newspapers (4.8 hours) or magazines (4.1 hours) (nma 4 March 2010).

Yes, some of this content will be consumed via an app, but far more through the regular mobile internet. We publish some very interesting data next week in new media age from the recently launched Mobile Media Metrics. In the sport category during last January, ten times as many people had accessed content via a browser than an app.

This booming medium is ripe with opportunities for brands to get involved, from banner ads to sponsorship to rich-media like video, without the need to launch a dedicated app.

And as Gregory pointed out, brands shouldn’t ignore simple text messaging that, especially via the operators’ recently introduced SMS marketing initiatives, give brands a targeted, large-scale opportunity to reach consumers. No one is trying to downplay the opportunity apps offer but there’s so much more.

No brand can afford to be so blinded by the headline glare of the app hype as to ignore the rest of mobile media. It’s time for agencies to be a bit braver in advising their clients so.

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