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Study: Mobile Users Want to Be Paid for Their Attention

A new study jointly conducted by Millward Brown and mobile loyalty platform SessionM finds that consumers want a clear "value exchange" or "tangible benefits" for their time and attention to mobile ads. The study was fielded earlier this year among two survey groups of 500 US adults and combined with qualitative follow-up interviews.

A primary finding of the study, which echoes Nielsen "consumer trust" data from previous research, is that only 9% of users have a favorable view of mobile ads. Despite their typically superior performance on brand and other KPIs, consumers generally report unfavorable views of mobile advertising in surveys such as the SessionM-Millward Brown study: 

The study argues that mobile ads need to deliver "tangible value" in order to gain consumer engagement. When they do they can outperform other types of digital and mobile advertising. SessionM says that tangible value has three components: "being useful, entertaining and worth the time it takes to engage." 

What this means as a practical matter, according to the study, is offering a literal reward for consumer attention (e.g., coupons, points), although people respond to other types of "incentives" as well as ads that are more "relevant" (e.g., local, personalized). 

The following were the preferred reward types according to the survey:

1. Gift cards
2. Coupon or discount of your choice
3. Coupon or discount selected for you
4. Tickets for Events
5. Points towards contest entries
6. Donations to Charity
7. Virtual Currency
8. Access to ad free environment
9. Access to free videos or songs
10. Access to free games
11. Access to exclusive content

Essentially people are saying they want to be paid to look at and engage with mobile ads. It's important to note that the study argues in favor of the types of advertising and marketing that SessionM provides: incentive and reward-based mobile loyalty programs. However other data show that consumers do respond to coupons and discounts at higher rates than other categories of mobile advertising. 

Survey: Why People Shop Locally, Price-Matching Works to Stop Showrooming

In April Harris Interactive conducted an online consumer survey about "showrooming" and related consumer attitudes about online and offline buying. The survey had 2,114 respondents, 824 of whom said they had showroomed: "ever visited a brick and mortar store to examine a product before purchasing it elsewhere online."

Accordingly 39% of the April 2013 survey population had engaged in showrooming at some point. That's actually down from 43% in November 2012 according to Harris.

Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target are the three major US retailers that are most often "victimized" by showrooming, though the order is different for men and women. This compares to a study (tracking actual store visits) with slightly different results, conducted in February by Placed:

According to the Harris study Amazon is by far the most-used online comparison point for in-store smartphone shoppers. A relatively small percentage also or alternatively consult eBay.

Harris also found that price-matching strategies being adopted by retailers are likely to succeed in combatting showrooming. A large majority of those who said they had "showroomed" also said this policy would make them more likely to buy in stores:

Source: Harris Interactive (4/13)

Survey respondents simultaneously indicated they like the option to "buy online and pick up in store." In terms of same-day delivery from an e-commerce provider, however, a majority (77%) said they would NOT be willing to pay more for the service. For those willing to pay the majority (56%) said between $1 and $5 was a tolerable range.

The survey also affirmed many of the familiar reasons that people prefer to shop locally vs. online:

1. Being able to take the item home immediately (86%)
2. Taking advantage of sales in store (84%)
3. Not having to deal with the hassles of returning online such as paying for shipping and/or having to pack item (83%)
4. Ability to touch and feel item (83%)

Being able to "talk with a salesperson" in stores was only valued by 57% of survey respondents. Indeed, a majority (60%) strongly agreed that they "would rather use [a] smartphone to search for information about a product than ask a salesperson for help."

I suspect the latter finding is a result of years of experiences with low-paid and generally poorly trained salespeople in retail stores.

Office Comes to the iPhone -- by Necessity

Microsoft has been in a kind of "double-bind." It has been trying to use Office integration with Windows Phone and Surface tablets to differentiate those products vs iOS and Android. However they haven't been selling particularly well (save in a few isolated countries). Yet the longer Microsoft held Office back from iOS (and Android) the more it faced the prospect of people getting used to alternative software or (Google) docs in the cloud.

Rumored for a very long time, today Office officially comes to the iPhone in app form (though not the iPad). In order to use the app iPhone owners must be subscribers to Office 365. It also requires iOS 6.1 as well and works on the iPhone 4 and above. 

The product appears to require a SkyDrive account in addition but that may be a built-in feature of Office 365. (I'm not a subscriber.) 

The new iPhone app allows users to view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. However you can only create Word and Excel documents on the app. Users will also be able to edit docs "offline" and they will sync when the connection is resumed (think airplane flight). Microsoft promises that "formatting and content remain intact" on the iPhone and back to the 365 documents in the cloud.

As mentioned, there's no Office for iPad app but that will ultimately come in all probability. For the time being iPad users can access Office 365 through the browser. So effectively Office is available for the iPad. 

There are now hundreds of millions of iOS devices in the market globally. This year more tablets are expected to ship than laptops and by 2015 more tablets than PCs in general. In the aggregate there will be more "mobile device" users than PC users in the very near future. Thus Microsoft was all but compelled to bring Office to iOS (Android users can access via the browser). 

After Windows, Office is Microsoft's most important and lucrative product -- generating rougly $25 billion in revenue last year. The rise of mobile devices puts enormous pressure on both product lines. However the arrival of Office for iOS means there's less reason to buy a Surface tablet. 

Five US Companies Will Control 76% of Global Mobile Ad Revenue in 2013

Last year, according to the IAB, mobile ad revenues came in just under $3.4 billion in the US. On a global basis eMarketer (aggregating a range of third party data) estimates that mobile advertising was worth $8.8 billion. Of that Google was responsible for a staggering 52%. 

In 2013 eMarketer argues that Google's share of global mobile advertising will continue to grow to 56%. 

Source: IAB 

Impressively or shockingly, nearly 66% of global mobile ad revenue in 2012 was concentrated in the top five companies according to eMarketer. In 2013 that figure is expected to exceed 75%.

The eMarketer forecast is that this year mobile advertising will be worth nearly $16 billion worldwide. In other words, roughly $12 billion of the world's mobile ad revenue will be concentrated in the top five US-based companies -- and most of that at Google. 

By comparison, the top 10 PC-based online advertising companies in the US control 72% of the revenue, while the top 50 control nearly 90%.

Source: IAB  

The eMarketer numbers may well be off. For example their YP figures are incorrect and underestimate the company's mobile revenues for 2012. However directionally the numbers are accurate and indicate the "concentration of mobile weath" in a small number of companies -- as well as the dominance of Google as the world's largest mobile ad company. (In terms of total digital advertising globally, Google controls 33%.) 

Facebook is really the only other player currently in a position to challenge Google for mobile ad revenue and reach. 

Will iPhone Buyers Wait for iPhone 6's Larger Screen?

The forthcoming iPhone 5S wil reportedly have the same screen size as the current iPhone 5. This will be a significant disappointment to some and potentially cause them to skip the update and wait for the iPhone 6, which is supposed to deliver a larger 4.8 inch screen. That could have a meaningful negative impact on iPhone 5S sales.

A recent survey from Retrevo shows that iPhone owners/buyers want a larger screen than the 5/5S has to offer:

The survey also showed that a significant percentage of would-be iPhone buyers have a "wait-and-see" attitude about buying their next iPhone. This is becoming a problem for Apple as media-fueled rumors of better hardware in the future cause people to delay purchases, unlike Android buyers apparently: 

Despite the wait-and-see approach and yearning for a larger screen iPhone buyers are paradoxically much more loyal, according to the survey, than Android owners. This has been confirmed by other, previous surveys (e.g., ChangeWave) as well.

Google Will Start to Punish Sites not Optimized for Mobile

There's a great deal of debate and discussion about the right approaches to mobile site development in the "SEO community." Should people build dedicated mobile sites; should they use responsive design; what about dynamic serving? The debates revolve around three considerations: complexity, optimal user experience and impact on mobile visibility (chiefly in Google search results).

Yesterday morning Google posted on its "Webmaster Central" blog that desktop sites using faulty or "irrelevant" redirects -- sending people on smartphones to the mobile site homepage, "page not found" pages or otherwise the wrong page in mobile -- would potentially suffer ranking consequences in mobile search results. 

Google expressed concern that "irrelevant redirects" are frustrating and disruptive to users -- and by implication reduce confidence in Google's mobile results. The company didn't address the precise ranking implications of not following its recommendations. However sites that don't correctly send people from PC pages to equivalent mobile pages will be demoted in the future.  

This is part of a larger push by Google to create good mobile user experiences and reinforce mobile search among consumers.

Last year, in a first, Google recommended responsive web design. Most marketers accepted that as gospel accordingly. However Google did not say that responsive was mandatory or recommended in every single case. It's certainly the lowest common denominator solution for publishers (though not always easiest to implement). 

Yet there are many reasons why "responsive" may not yield the best user experience overall (page load time, different mobile user intent, etc.). Regardless, Google is beginning to compel publishers to pay more attention to mobile user experiences (if they're not already) or suffer the ranking consequences. 

Google Becomes More Like Siri, As Siri Becomes More Like Google

It's fascinating to watch Google evolve from a "search engine" into something much more interesting and complex. The rise of mobile, the launch of Google Now, the improvements in voice search and the more recent, conceptual introduction of what Google is calling "conversational search" all point to where search at Google is headed.

The search metaphor is giving way to the personal assistant metaphor. The entry of Siri in the market roughly two years ago was the trigger of the transition.

Google search boss Amit Singhal was deeply enamored of Star Trek as a boy and, like others at Google, has openly fantasized about building the "Star Trek computer." In other words, a computer one could simply speak to naturally and get correct and complete information. 

Google Now, also sometimes called "predictive search," tries to go beyond that purely "conversational" scenario by anticipating user needs and interests based on big data and personal search history (and movements). Google Now is highly imperfect but when it works it's impressive. 

While Google has only recently sought to move in the direction of "personal assistant," Siri has always been an "assistant" but only recently aspired to be a search utility. Siri was explicitly conceived as a tool that would enable the accomplishment of specific tasks and not simply the retrieval and display of information.

As Apple has added more structured data feeds to what Siri can access it has improved -- much of Siri's value for users still comes from controlling the device and initiating calls, texts and emails rather than "searching" -- however the great "Achilles heel" for Siri has been its limited dataset and lack of flexibility. 

Although it wasn't true when Siri was first introduced, Google has now exceeded Siri by bringing its web-search capabilities and into the virtual assistant equation. Google has a much deeper (albeit mostly unstructured) knowledge base to call upon vs. Apple. Thus for numerous questions where Siri didn't have a structured response it would have to default to web search (i.e., Google): "I didn't understand XYZ [query], shall I search the web for XYZ."

Google would then ride to the rescue. In the Google universe it can bring increasingly structured answers to the same user queries but also its full index as a backup. 

With the coming integration of Twitter, Wikipedia and especially Bing into Siri's roster of data sources with iOS7, Apple adds a full web index and much more breadth to what Siri can do without having to hand off to a third party search engine (i.e., Google). And unlike current scenarios where users typically have to explicitly ask Siri to "search the web" to obtain XYZ information, soon they'll just ask for "XYZ" -- and Bing will supply the necessary or desired information.

The deal has potential to dramatically broaden Siri's utility and usage frequency. Equally it could, if successful, significantly increase search query volume coming to Bing from iPhone users. The integration will need to be very "elegant" to win over users, who are accustomed to either using apps or Google in the Safari toolbar to "search the web" on the iPhone. Users will need to be educated about Siri's new capabilities.

The integration of Bing's search capabilities is a "crossing the Rubicon" of sorts for Apple as it declares that comprehensive data and search capabilities are necessary to fully deliver on the promise of the personal-virtual assistant. 

Pew: 81 Million US Adults Own Tablets

According to telephone survey data (n=2,252) released this morning by The Pew Internet & Life Project, 34% of US adults now own tablets. What that means as a practical matter is: 81 million adults. There may also be 20 million more people in the US under 18 who own tablets. (Our house has four.) 

I think it's relatively safe to say that if the number of tablets in the US isn't yet 100 million it's extremely close.  

A large majority of tablet owners are substituting tablets for PC usage in many instances and either buying fewer PCs overall or delaying PC replacement for a much longer period. This morning Apple will open its developer conference. A upgraded iPad/Mini is not expected to be among the announcements but it's possible. 

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As with other device categories, the story is largely the same with tablets. Penetration rates are higher among college educated (49%) and more affluent adults (56%). Affluent means at least $75,000 in income.   

The chart above reflects the growth of tablets since 2010 when only 3% reported tablet ownership. It's possible that by Q4 of 2014 half of the US adult population will have tablets (and 75% of affluents).

Global tablet shipments this year are expected to exceed those of laptop computers according to IDC. IDC also argues most of those sales will be at the lower end of the market (size, price).

Last week both Pew and Nielsen reported that 61% of mobile subscribers now own smartphones.