Technology's Everyday Impact on the Everyman Consumer

On June 8, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) hosted a digital media council, "Digital Innovation: The Impact of Technology on Consumers' Everyday Lifestyle and Implication for Brand and Engagement and Interaction" to address the impact of using video in advertising, specifically within mobile devices. The digital media council featured representatives from digital-marketing research company InsightExpress, Internet giant Google, advertising newspaper Adweek, and global marketing communications network JWT.

The increased use and purchase of mobile devices has opened a new, successful channel for commercial advertising, with customers more receptive to advertisements on their personal devices. According to Molly Elmore, vice president of market research at InsightExpress, video and mobile advertising have doubled in a two-year period, and video advertising is expected to triple by 2013.

"Video ads are more effective at teaching people about brands" said Elmore. "They are engaging and exciting in that consumers are watching that information and learning about [brands]." Elmore cited television-streaming website Hulu.com as a primary example of customer dedication to video content. "Hulu has exploded in terms of gross. People are loyal fans of Hulu and will sit there and watch these advertisements."

Brian Morrissey, digital editor at Adweek, stressed the need for companies to utilize these new mediums to their advantage. "Digital and real life are blurring," he said. "The internet was always been something we did alone. But mobile is with us all the time. For brands, this is really, really important. There is this question whether technology is going to alienate people from brands. [It] depends on how companies can leverage."

The digital media council panelists noted that cultural and attitudinal shifts towards the cell phone are also a prominent factor in the growing impact in video advertising. David Rosenberg, director of emerging media at JWT, observed that "intimacy with the device is a new attitudinal appreciation." Rosenberg prefaced that, "I'm pretty sure people are more frightened about loosing their mobile device than their wallet [...] It's everything. Especially if you're talking about smartphones."

Elmore asserted that smartphones are becoming the standard with which to engage with customers. She concluded that basic phones are fading into obscurity with 75 percent of consumers planning on their next cell phone being more advanced than their present phone.

Campbell Foster, industry marketing manager of media and platforms marketing at Google, commented that this increase of consumers with smartphones will alter more than advertising, but also how companies interact with consumers. "I think you're going to see a lot more two way video," he predicted. "A lot more dialogue between brands and consumers."

News relevant to the customer relationship management industry is posted several times a day on destinationCRM.com, in addition to the news section Insight that appears every month in the pages of CRM magazine.

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