Despite more affordable VR headsets (Oculus Quest) and the success of the Beat Saber game, VR will mostly matter for B2B and industrial players or play a role in employee training.
phones, not on smart home speakers. Augmented reality (AR) will start really taking off in 2020 (think Google Maps’ AR experience or Snapchat’s augmented experiences) because it has become a platform play at scale: Developers can tap into more than one billion compatible smartphones to build new integrated experiences.
3. Mobile will act as the personalization experience hub
It is not a channel, but a way to deliver an integrated offline/online experience in real time. Some brands like Starbucks, McDonald’s, Nike, Argos, John Lewis, and Schibsted, to name a few, get it and execute pretty well the integration of mobile into their marketing strategy. But most struggle and still need to fix their mobile foundation.
4. Mobile will become a key enabler of societal engagement for values-based customers
Think of apps for good like Yuka, mobile accessibility apps like vocal commands for blind people, and those for green IT (including dark mode); even though the key issue here is when Gen Z will realize the negative impact of smartphone and digital on climate change.
5. Leading CMOs will leverage mobile to optimize the marketing mix
MMA has proven through numerous cross marketing effectiveness research that many brands under invest in mobile. We expect the leaders to define the role of mobile in achieving growth objectives and to start measuring offline media impact in (almost) real time.
For example, for retailers, to put it shortly, this is less about mCommerce and more about how mobile drives traffic to the store and generates total incremental revenue. Mobile contextual data and transactional pointof-service data are thus central to improving media attribution across every channel, not just mobile.
6. Moment automation will require you to assemble your own (mobile) martech stack
Once you have defined key mobile moments across your customer journey, you must identify the right trigger points and automate content and messaging. Think of it as push notifications and in-app messages on steroids. To do this right, it often means you need to assemble your own martech stack with leading mobile point solutions and integrate them with many other marketing systems.
At the minimum, you need app store optimization (ASO), mobile CRM (customer relationship management), analytics, and attribution.
7. Mobile data privacy becomes a strategic differentiator to establish trust
A lot of the hidden harvesting of consumer data happens through mobile. To establish trust and enable personalization (or lack thereof, if consumers precisely do not want to share data), will be the key to integrate mobile into your privacy-by-design approach.
8. App platforms will continue to get traction
The rise of super apps is not just happening with the likes of Tencent, Alibaba, and messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. This trend is accelerating in other regions, too, such as in South America.
9. Expect more rationalization of mobile interfaces
Many brands I have spoken to recently told me they suffer a lot from hybrid development that’s supposed to work across different platforms (think Flutter, React, or Kotlin) and that they prefer to focus on native apps and/ or mobile web-first experiences.
Forrester has claimed for years that progressive web apps (PWA) are a key way to deliver app like experiences. According to Forrester’s Q2 2019 Global Emerging Technology Executive Online Survey, 18% of digital executives plan to pilot PWA in the next 12 months.
10. Leaders will integrate meaningful mobile metrics into their dashboards
Marketers measure too many vanity KPIs when it comes to mobile. Let’s measure less pure digital KPIs and more meaningful metrics: customer experience, incremental revenue, DAU/MAU (daily/monthly active users), and customer lifetime value (CLV), etc.
11. Mobile will drive more than 80% of digital ad growth next year
Looking at the top five EU countries, we expect PC advertising spending to remain flat, while mobile advertising will grow from €22.9 billion (Rs 1,83,905 crore) at the end of 2019 to €26.1 billion (Rs 2,09,604 crore) by the end of 2020, representing 64% of total digital advertising spend.
12. Retail media is set to explode
Mobile is only a component of the retail media opportunity, but will play a key role, when it comes to “drive-tostore” offerings, for example. More specifically, Amazon generated $10 billion (Rs 71,763 crore) of ad revenue last year, and next year it is likely that it will represent more than 5% of its total revenue, increasingly challenging Google/Facebook’s duopoly.
13. Streaming fatigue will lead to new offerings
Again, far from being just a mobile play, but, the war between Disney+, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, and low-cost Apple TV+ to compete with Netflix and Prime Video will exhaust consumers and lead to new content subscription models.
14. Audio advertising will continue to grow fast, driven by podcasts as the next $1 billion ad format
Podcasts are massively listened to via mobile, and they will drive audio advertising more than voice-based assistants will.
15. Visual search will take off for fashion and home decoration brands
Despite Pinterest’s initiatives, it is still early days for visual search. For selected brands, however, visual recommendations, and to a lesser extent, visual search will become key ways to engage consumers.