avin narasimhan

often rambling, but hopefully always interesting

Notes

Reflection + Implications: Rethinking Mobile For Brands #Planning-ness2010

Back at the office in Boston, and clearing my head after 2 awesome days in Denver at Planning-ness. Yet again feel like I learned so much more than I can possibly process just yet. Thanks to Mark and Claire (not to mention my favorite Brit, Gareth, for having client conflicts that opened up a spot :-) (sorry dude, we missed you)), I was incredibly lucky to have the chance to present and work with a group of amazing people. I dragged Dino (@chroma) into presenting with me, which made it all the more fun and entertaining experience.


I posted the deck on Friday, but here it is again in case you haven’t yet seen (and it serves as reference for the rest of this post).


Beyond the deck, wanted to give a bit more context around how we approached the session, what we learned, and some initial thoughts on implications for brands and mobile experiences. And share a bit of what the group who attended the work session taught me.

As you can tell from the deck, our overall aim was to bring forward some thoughts on why brands struggle with mobile today, and some ways we can go about changing that. Branded mobile experiences are something we’re surely all dealing with at our respective agencies, but I think in many ways we’re all struggling to find the right answers to some key questions. We brought a few theories forward in our presentation, and our workshop challenge was to take a brand that we assigned, and think through a rich mobile experience (ie more than just an idea for an app).


We posed a lot of questions to the group that chose to attend (reflected in the deck so I won’t repeat them all here), and asked a lot of them. And to be honest, both in quantity and quality, we got for more than we were expecting. People came up with some pretty incredible ideas. It speaks to the caliber of people in the room, perhaps more than anything else. We got some decent feedback from those in attendance and from our broader connections. And the session definitely helped add on to the initial implications we had in our presentation (there were actually so many great ideas coming from all of the groups, we didn’t really get to wrap up with implications at the end). I felt we learned as much from people in the session as they did from us.

Anyway, here are some of the key points I wanted to sum up. We may not know exactly what we are doing, but the fun part is figuring it out.
Neither of us claimed to have all the answers from the outset. Truth is, I’ve been doing plenty of thinking around mobile, how to actually do it right, and a lot of what’s been banging around in my head was reflected in this deck/session. While I would’ve loved to have 25 case studies of smashing mobile success, I don’t. In fact, I’m not sure anyone does right now. But it felt like an interesting and challenging enough topic to at least start the conversation among the planning community.

And these sentiments weren’t limited to our session. The idea of experimenting with the slightly unknown was a common theme throughout, and speakers from Aki to Paul highly encouraged doing stuff even if you’re not all that familiar with it, rather than endlessly debating and worrying about the reasons not to do something. It’s one of the things that I think drew people to planning-ness last year and again this year— to try and do stuff that none of us are necessarily comfortable or experienced in, but stuff that we all collectively know needs to happen. Complexity and potential richness, while challenging, makes mobile even more interesting.
One of the reasons I wanted to try and do a session about mobile is that I feel most brands currently have a somewhat limited view of the potential— ie smartphone apps. Again, not at all wrong (I’m an app freak, but few are from big brands), just that there could be more to it, and it’s not always the best/right answer. Truth is there’s a lot we can do, given that there is a lot people do on their phones, we just need to find the right ways to provide value at the right times (wow, incredibly obvious I know, but I guess worth reminding ourselves). So we tried to challenge people in our work session to think outside the mobile app. And specifically, think about at least 3 elements other than an app for a branded mobile experience. In hindsight I probably went on a bit too much about ‘thinking beyond apps’, and my point wasn’t to say it’s wrong, but rather there can be many other elements to the mobile experience.


Our assumption was that thinking beyond the app would prove somewhat challenging. But surprisingly, many people in our groups were able to go above and beyond, and brought some incredible thinking to the workshop. We were blown away not only by the quantity of ideas but also by the quality of each and every one that the various groups brought to the larger session.It was not easy, but smart people brought some smart thinking to the table.
In retrospect, one thing we should’ve added to the workshop was to challenge people to think about how they would actually get people to know about their mobile ideas. Would it be through traditional ads? In-store promotions for those who had retail brands? Rely on brand site and social web delivery? But, I suppose there’s only so much you can cram into a 45 minute work session.

Mobile is a huge opportunity for planners, in particular.
Perhaps the most interesting thing still to me is that, after our session, after talking with creatives, after talking with media folks, mobile is still a vague area that we’re all trying to figure out. Scary perhaps for some. But should be exciting for planners. Just as Aki talked about when it comes to planning apps, the same goes for mobile. Planners have an opportunity to figure this shit out in the immediate and help bring others along. We have the chance to not only set strategy but actually make ideas happen. Or at the least, get more involved in the making of ideas than perhaps we have been in the past when it came to traditional advertising (or to steal another Aki phrase, “ad-like objects”). And I think this reality of blurring lines will make our job more difficult— and provide a further filter for who chooses to take on the challenge. It is definitely outside the ‘skill set’ traditionally asked of planners, but a challenge I think is necessary. And it’s a mentality we’d be smart to look for in future hires at our respective agencies. But I’m curious- what might you have done differently with this session?
 We got a ton out of this session, and it felt like people were into it, but I’m also curious to hear other angles in or ways to approach the topic. What are some of those topics or challenges around mobile that you may be dealing with at your agency? What do you think was missing? Any other ways you’ve been thinking about/doing to address current issues with mobile ideas? How would you have gone about a workshop on the same topic? Love any and all thoughts.

Thanks again to Mark and Claire (and though I wasn’t there, sounds like Thas killed it in NYC) for a great Planning-ness 2010. Can’t wait for next year.

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