Canadian advertisers are lazy in the mobile space. That’s what Tim Wilson, head of industry at Google Canada, told the audience Monday at Digital Day, a conference in Toronto co-presented by Marketing and the Canadian Marketing Association.
Too many advertisers and publishers have tried to push a desktop experience onto mobile instead of creating a unique, tailored mobile environment, Wilson said during a panel discussion on what’s next in digital advertising. He shared the stage with AOL digital prophet David Shing and Graham Harris, head of advertiser product marketing and solutions at Yahoo.
The three digital media professionals offered their perspective on a variety of digital trends including digital advertising auctions, de-friending and what mobile adoption means for marketers.
Wilson spoke about the high expectations consumers have for mobile and encouraged the marketers in attendance to build mobile sites using HTML5 or “responsive design” so that they work quickly, react to local information and offer a “seamless experience.”
“We thought we could just plaster our desktop homepage onto a mobile homepage and expect users to be happy with it,” Wilson said. “In the industry I work in, we talk about how we are lazy and we need to get better collectively at delivering the mobile experience.”
“[Smartphones] are going to become, in the next five years, the device. We need to get better at delivering that value – those proper messages – to the user because that is what they are demanding,” he said.
AOL’s Shing echoed Wilson’s sentiment. “You should start with the environment that [consumers] are using. If their primary screen is mobile and you don’t have a mobile strategy, then shame on you.”
“You should start at the mobile,” Shing said, “then build apps and desktop because the desktop is going to be the dinosaur.”
Related
• David Shing says good content is in context
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