The Mobile Era
What a fantastic time to be in mobile. Minutes of use for mobile exceed PC Web usage, sell-through of smartphones and tablets exceed that of PCs, and the buzz around new, mobile-app-originated global brands such as Angry Birds is inescapable.
Mobile is fulfilling its promise: it is becoming more and more integrated into our daily lives, influencing beliefs and world views, enabling new means of interacting, living and even thinking that was science fiction not too long ago. A fantastic time, indeed.
The mobile explosion does, however, have essential issues of property, liberty and privacy that we must wrestle with. Who gets to say when messaging platforms should be throttled or monitored? What tracking is done and how can consumers interact with the trackers? What personal info should be asked for in exchange for free usage of intellectual property? As an industry, we need to find sensible answers to these questions that strike the right balance, or someone else will, which may produce results that limit creativity or our ability to deliver value to our customers.
That leads us in mobile ad tech to some important questions: how do we advance the goals of our businesses and industry while preserving the trust of our customers? How do we help our customers monetize the fruits of their labors that preserves the value of their IP, respects the needs and desires of end users, and ensures that the end-to-end flow of commerce is uninterrupted and flowing so the engine of growth that has brought us this fantastic era of mobile doesn’t sputter out of fuel?
In other words, how do we ensure we are not just beneficiaries, but, indeed, builders of the mobile ad tech space?
In our view, we achieve this by following key business principles:
- Communicate with our industry colleagues, the press, prospects and customers in a clear, unambiguous manner – don’t inflate current capabilities or delivered benefits; be clear on what’s real and what’s roadmap, and don’t hide behind jargon.
- Build platforms that can scale reliably with performance; don’t release what are really just testbeds or proofs of concept to customers that won’t know the truth until it’s too late.
- When you do make a mistake or fail, step up and acknowledge it, learn from it, and move on. In a dynamic, demanding sector such as ours, failure is inevitable. If it’s done honestly and we learn from it, it can be a good thing. We have to stop pretending that there are no failures, papering over our missteps and trying to obfuscate the reality.
- Spend time understanding the customers’ requirements. Don’t spec in a vacuum, don’t build without a roadmap, don’t launch without a clear position and message as to what you’re doing and why.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive, and I welcome comments, brickbats, additions, or any other feedback.
In our coming posts, we’ll try to add to the conversation in this, our fantastic world called mobile. And we’ll also be doing our best to live up to our own standards, as expressed here and elsewhere.
See you on the bit stream.