Why Mobile Will Dominate Marketing

Mobile marketing, or as we at Little Jack like to call it, marketing on microscopic screens, is all the rage. At no other time in history have fully-functioning adults regularly fallen into as many potholes, missed so many incredibly attractive potential life partners on the street, and generally gone through life as oblivious to their surroundings. Why? Two words: Tiny screens.

Why mobile marketing is on the up:

People use their mobile devices more than they think they do.

While desktop web browsing tends to take place in longer “sessions”, the ever-present nature of smartphones means that we use them for shorter but much more frequent info transactions. For the next hour, try to be conscious of everything you use your smartphone for. You might be surprised how often you reach for it. The term crackberry didn’t come from nowhere.

A few days ago, our editor had to disable his wireless data in order to keep from going over on his data usage. The withdrawal he experienced during those three days made Trainspotting look like The Color Purple.

We bring them everywhere.

Going jogging? Keep track of your mileage. Hitting the sack? Record your movements to analyze your sleeping patterns. Brushing your teeth? Use a timer that ensures you allot appropriate time to each quadrant of your denticles (seriously, check out iBrush).

Since the invention of the first TV (and the invention of the first couch potato 5 minutes later), no other platform has had such cultural ubiquity and integrated into our lifestyles so completely as has the smartphone.

We trust our mobile devices with everything.

We trust our devices to know every place we go (how else can you check in on Four Square, bro?), scan the products we buy, track our daily calories, even send us push notifications. Think about that for a second — even when we aren’t using an app, it is allowed to bother us as it deems appropriate. That’s an awful lot of power. If your desktop started talking to you like that, you’d probably start getting nervous and smash it with a hammer.

Instant GrADification

Remember the days when you had to actually think for a minute in order to remember the name of that one actor in that one movie? Or when you had to ask around to find out what that sweet tune is, pumping through the sound system? Thank god we don’t have to think that hard anymore. Smartphones do it for us!

This works in favor of advertising. Usually, an ad has to be memorable enough to be recalled long after viewing, because viewing the ad and buying the product are two entirely separate processes. That is, unless you’re watching late night TV and some sort-of-celebrity is pleading with you to please order NOW, because it’s a LIMITED TIME OFFER!, you actually have to remember to buy the damn thing later.

But with the invention of QR codes, smartphones collapsed the distance between ad and transaction, making the transition instantaneous. You see the ad, point your phone at it, and you’re immediately on the company’s webpage, buying, sharing, or at the very least signing up for something weird. So listen. We can’t legally tell you to chuck that desktop computer out the window. But, as your attorneys, we can advise you to pay more attention to mobile marketing and try to incorporate it into your marketing strategy. [templatera id=”10395″]