Future of Mobile 08: Advertising, Advocacy, Attitude & Aptitude (What!?)

Jonathan MacDonald — Ogilvy One

Jonathan gave an impassioned speech arguing that all advertising should be personalised; that companies should work with their customers to offer them opportunities to buy more things they like; and involve them in encouraging their friends to buy the same things too.

It kind of sounds like a friendly way to do things, but it’s still all about persuading people to buy more stuff. Using social media for advertising can work well up to a point, but to make the things that Tomi and Jonathan talk about work, you need access to a fluidity of data that isn’t there for most of the world — yet. And I’ve a nasty feeling that aggressive, Blade Runner-style advertising will keep on winning enough new customers to keep the corporates interested.

• Would you accept advertising on your mobile?
  • Of course not — it’s too personal!
• New advertising model: brand as facilitator
  • see David Armano for graphics
  • Creating armies of fanatics
  • What happens after brand awareness?
  • e.g. pizza company will pay you £100 if you complain — it’s cheaper than losing £500 due to lost sales
• We are not consumers
  • We tolerate segmentization and useless marketing
  • We filter out stuff that doesn’t mean anything to us — sometimes even before we find out if it’s actually useful
  • JMac would like to abolish toleration of non-personalised marketing
  • It still works for my 5 year-old son — though I wish it wouldn’t… :-)
  • “If it fails once, it’s an outright fail”
  • How not to do it: Jose Avila was sued for making loads of FedEx furniture & blogging about it
  • • Fedex said that he “violated their terms of use” — a great way to put off lots of customers!
    • Wikipedia: “The dispute attracted widespread press attention, and Avila was frequently interviewed to tell his side of the story”
• More buzzwords: Vendor Relationship Management & Vaporframes
  • "Apple would make more money if they know I wanted them to contact me by MMS & phone, rather than email"
• Advertising with people not to them

Full presentation available online

Jonathan is on twitter and has a blog.