for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, May 6-8 in Palm Springs.
New numbers from Nielsen indicate that apps are on the way up. Makes sense since smartphone penetration, according to the report, is up 50 percent (compared to 12 percent last year). So if apps are on the rise, should marketers focus more on apps than on mobile optimized sites? Jeff Hasen, CMO of Hipcricket, a mobile marketing company, believes it’s not a binary option. Each brings its own set of advantages and disadvantages.
There are few absolutes in mobile. I never bought the debate that tried to make us believe that mobile Web and mobile apps was an either/or situation. As marketers, we need to follow the numbers, keep an open mind, and anticipate what’s next. Yes, apps appear to be on the rise. But we have to dig deeper and ask “why”. One driver is the always-on nature of apps across the board. Many apps (like games) can be used even when there is no connectivity. We know that many apps are downloaded —but we also have evidence that many apps lose their appeal quickly and are rarely, if ever, used. In contrast, a mobile website is a more of a necessity than a novelty. People require access to optimized destinations using their mobile devices and they expect brands to provide mobile-friendly experiences once they get there. This — as I learned from ESPN while researching my newly released Mobilized Marketing book — is critical. Mobile users often punish brands that fail to deliver a great mobile experience.
Read Hasen’s full post at JeffHasen.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jeffhasen.
More in Media
Digiday+ Research: Publishers apply AI to streamline tasks and improve audience experience
Publishers increasingly embed AI tools into daily functions, especially streamlining tasks and improving the audience experience.
Ozone’s platform tries to simulate how publisher content appears in AI answers
Ozone’s new simulation platform aims to crack AI’s black box to let publishers model how their content gets surfaced in AI answer engines.
CNN builds in-house agent infrastructure as it prepares for AI-driven media trading
In Q3, it plans to test one or two properties to see how they’re interpreted by LLMs, before turning in Q4 to buyer behavior and whether budgets are being allocated toward agent-to-agent trading experiments.