Patrick Albano has been in digital sales since the dot com boom, when he worked for sites like About.com, InfoUSA.com, and Medsite.com. He’s now vice-president of social, mobile and innovation sales at Yahoo in New York. This week, Albano’s in Toronto to give a keynote presentation at Marketing’s 2013 Mobile Day. Before the conference Marketing caught up with him to talk about over-hyped trends in mobile, native advertising and integrating brands into consumers’ mobile experience.
Your talk is called “Making it Mobile.” Give us a quick preview.
Meeting with marketers, there’s a lot of trends I hear about. One that’s overused but under-explained is that “mobile is personal.” I want to dig into that and uncover how important mobile is to the things people do everyday. How do we as publishers and marketers think about mobile differently because it’s so personal?
Mobile marketers have face a lot of challenges, from finding ROI to optimizing for different screen sizes and finding quality development shops. What are some recent concerns you’ve heard from marketers?
Marketers are trying to use device features, like location, as the only thing they do in mobile marketing. That’s an important thing to use, but all the basics inherent to marketing – changing people’s purchase behaviour, branding et cetera – should also be done in mobile. The native components of the device are things you should think about, but not the only thing.
Just doing a hyped trend like geolocation – reaching someone as they walk by your store, getting their phone to buzz and putting a coupon in their hands – that’s a sandwich board mentality. You don’t want mobile to be a device to turn someone’s attention in an unnatural way. Location is part of the equation, but there’s so much more that’s also happening you can use to impact behaviour. It will hurt the industry if we focus too much on really specific things.
Yahoo is a digital brand. Any tips for brands with legacy businesses now going digital?
I’ve banned the word “extension” on my team. That’s indicative of the mentality to create something – a TV show or magazine piece, even a PC-based program – then throw up a mobile extension. That automatically assumes the mobile piece is an add-on.
Consumers are thinking about mobile as their first device. We should try to create mobile-specific experiences that tap into what people are thinking about while they use the device.
Yahoo has started creating original video, including the web series Burning Love. Is exclusively owned content necessary to play in the social/mobile space?
Our strategy involved exclusive and owned as well as curated and user-generated. I don’t think it’s essential. It’s more important to get people to the right information. The companies that win will be able to personalize the experience in a way that keeps consumers coming back.
Part of our strategy is original content, but I wouldn’t discourage companies from thinking they can have a great mobile experience without having it.
Within mobile there’s both smartphones and tablets. Does each require it’s own strategy?
They’re definitely different in terms of the way people engage with them. We’re just now figuring out how consumers want content on the two devices. I think they need to be separate because consumers think about them as separate things and use them at different times.
That’s a daunting thing for marketers. They’re thinking, “Oh god, now I have to create four or five new digital strategies.” I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. You can have the same strategy but use those devices as different components of it.
Before Yahoo, you were at Citizen Sports where you helped integrate brands into Facebook and mobile apps. Is this the best strategy for driving results in mobile – integrating brands directly into the experience?
What we were doing at Citizen Sports was the beginning of native advertising. We tried to look at what consumers were doing, take that natural behaviour and then have an advertiser be a part of that, it’s a much more real and personal ad experience than the standard advertising on the web. At Yahoo we’re doing a blend of native and creative. There’s a whole new wave of brands getting integrated into experiences.
A few tickets are still available for Mobile Day 2013. Join us at the Arcadian Court in Toronto.
