Beyond the Install

I wanted to start off my first blog post with TUNE by saying thank you to all of the people who’ve helped me to grow, learn, and who’ve challenged me over the past 15 years in this wild and crazy industry, whether you call it digital or mobile or even online advertising. Like most folks I meet, I didn’t grow up wanting to be a digital marketing hero. We wanted to be musicians or artists, or doctors or lawyers, or even Wall Street tycoons.

What really unites us all is the time and space we live in today, and the tremendous and revolutionary effects of the advent of the internet, mass consumer adoption of broadband bandwidth, and now the even more game-changing effects of a smartphone in every pocket. What gets me most excited? It’s the incredible level of connectivity. It’s the fact that I can be up in an airplane, headed from San Francisco to New York City, traveling at 30,000 feet in the air, and be connected to the Internet via my smartphone. Take a moment to really think about the virtual and physical Internet pipes which connect us all, and their unbelievable capacity to collect and analyze insane amounts of data. Put it all together and we now have the potential to understand our human communications in a way that even 10 years ago was not possible.

I am a creature of habit, and I often use my wife as an example in my client meetings. You see, back in 2009 I was fortunate enough to take a leap of faith and play a key role at Microsoft as one of the very first (read: crazy) folks to be crisscrossing the country and preaching about the upcoming climate change around mobile adoption. In this role I would frequently mention how my wife was using her phone WAY more than her computer to access the Internet. Well that trend has only increased, to the extent where it is now such a common part of her day to reach for her iPhone that it’s really become more of an extension of her thought process: I’m curious about this (search here) … I want to remember where we were that day (open this app) … I really want to order these Kangoo-Jumps (Google it) from Australia so I can amp up my fitness level (open this other app). It’s actually all quite amazing to watch the behavior if you keep perspective on how far we’ve come in just the past five years.

So why do we care? This is a marketing blog after all. I wanted to provide some perspective on how far we’ve come as an industry and how quickly consumer behavior patterns have dramatically changed in just the past decade. And despite everything we’ve built on the web, the biggest brands and agencies are not adopting mobile marketing strategy fast enough to keep up with the rampant consumer demand. Consumers LOVE their smartphones, and they REALLY LOVE their apps. Despite all we’ve learned over the last decade regarding traffic driving campaigns, paid and organic optimization efforts, and customer engagement strategies, most large brands are satisfied simply building an app and leaving it up to chance if consumers will find them. Would you build a website and not devote significant time and resources to driving traffic? Would you not hire a team to optimize your website to ensure you’re showing up when consumers are looking for you? Wouldn’t it be a smart idea to invest in some analytical tools to understand how people are using your website, and how you can optimize the experience to engage consumers to ultimately take an action or make a purchase?

Well, it’s all possible in today’s mobile app ecosystem. The technology is available today and is ready to be capitalized on. We are ready for the digital marketing industry to fully embrace the mobile consumer revolution and deploy the wealth of knowledge and strategies that we’ve all been practicing on the Web over the last decade.

Onward with this crazy industry. We are ready to unleash the economic potential of mobile app marketing—there is no rest for the weary!

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