What are your biggest opportunities and challenges for the next 12-24 months?
The biggest opportunity is for UberMedia to achieve a leadership position in the mobile ad revolution by providing a differentiated product and superior service to our clients. Mobile advertising will be the engine that leads the industry for the foreseeable future. Consumers spend more time with their mobile devices than they do watching TV. Which means that our mobile device is now the first screen. Further, it’s the vehicle that can measure our real-world footprints giving marketers the ability to connect to consumers based on their real-world behaviors and measure their marketing based on physical foot traffic.
This is a game changer – instead of marketers measuring their ad dollars based on media outcomes (like ad impressions or target rating points), they can measure their success based on business outcomes in the form of incremental foot traffic. The challenge is that we are still working on breaking the code to apply this cross media location measurement across the entire media mix with fractional conversion attribution.
What keeps your clients up at night?
For marketers, the reason you lose sleep today is very similar to why you lost sleep 15-20 years ago; namely, market share losses, revenue or margin loss, and the like. What’s really driving their ulcers is the sheer velocity of the marketplace and digital disruption. Mobile penetration and usage is skyrocketing. And yet, the traditional marketing and advertising models that worked in TV or even the Internet don’t seem to apply. We have good thinking around these issues and the hope is that we can be their mobile antacid and sleeping aid.
What’s the hardest thing to educate clients about?
Advertisers get very excited when they see the power of our mobile ad tech that uses mobile behavior to target ads. We understand consumer interests, intent, and location history. They love all the hyper-targeting. Yet, sometimes, the creative doesn’t match the power of the targeting. It can be a complete disconnect. The audience targeting and the creative together constitute the whole for a campaign. Sometimes this is missed.
What ad trends to you see accelerating in the next year?
I see three major trends that will start to re-shape advertising. First, mobile will take center stage (finally) as the primary tool in the marketer’s toolbox. No longer will mobile be an afterthought and be the third or fourth vehicle planned. Second, Location Visit Rate will be the next big Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Measuring and optimizing on real-world location visits (foot traffic) will be a no-brainer as advertisers demand accountability to business metrics. Third, for ad tech, no differentiation will lead to certain death. There are thousands of ad tech companies that sit between brands and consumers. The sea-of-sameness is vast. With no clear differentiator, these companies will start to fade and some completely vanish.
–Michael Hayes is CMO and Revenue Officer at UberMedia.
