"We are on the cusp," Cary Tilds, SVP and Head of Digital at Team Detroit said during her keynote at Marketing the Mobile Channel. "We really are," she added after a brief hesitation. Tilds' said that mobile marketing is incredibly close to becoming a big business and marketing around mobile search will lead the way.
Tilds' company, Team Detroit is the official name of a new joint venture that combined a number of marketing agency WPP's Detroit-based agencies: JWT, Y&R, Wunderman, Ogilvy and Group M's two media companies Mediaedge and Mindshare. Because of its location, Team Detroit's biggest client is Ford Motor Company, which has been particularly aggressive on the mobile front.
With Team Detroit's help, Ford launched four mobile websites during a four month period last year: Edge, Sync, Expedition and Focus. Ford was particularly focused on targeting the 28- to 34-year-old demographic and following the campaigns, the company saw a 114 percent increase in purchase consideration for that age group. Purchase consideration across all age groups increased 31 percent. Enpocket generated the site-side tracking for the four sites, but Team Detroit plans on doing all of that in the future.
Tilds admitted to being an iPhone user, but also predicted that the iPhone and smartphones like it are the harbingers of our mobile future, which she argued is a trend that will benefit mobile marketers.
"The number of ad impressions between October and December [last year] that were delivered to the iPhone quintupled to nearly 11 million, while sales of iPhones doubled during that period," Tilds said.
Tilds said the iPhone had all of the ingredients to enable the success of mobile marketing: It has the processing capacity, the media applications and the right screen size. Tilds said those were the three ingredients that phones need to have in order to encourage mobile content consumption. Since there is a 95 percent correlation between mobile content consumption and usage of mobile search, Tilds said phones like the iPhone will inevitable open up mobile marketing to a wider audience. -Brian