The 10 Best Quotes from our Brand Summit

Earlier today was our Brand Summit, where we brought together representatives from a wide variety of household name brands with key thought leaders from the mobile marketing world and beyond to explore and discuss the best way to reach and retain customers in the omnichannel world.

Mobile is the ultimate personal device for speaking to consumers, but between the complexities of app marketing, the ever-changing world of programmatic and the multiplying selection of messaging platforms, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, and that’s before we bring in innovations like AR, VR, the Internet of Things and smart cities. Our Brand Summit aims to be a knowledge hub for brand marketers looking to get the most from mobile, letting them discuss the challenges that they face with a wide range of experts and peers.

If you weren’t able to make it to the Summit, you missed out on some fantastic guidance from leading industry figures, but you can still access some of the gems of wisdom here, with our top 10 quotes from the day.

“When Theresa May announced the election, I had a personal mission. I knew our readers were young and engaged. They want to be entertained and informed.”
Sophie Tighe, Snapchat editor, The Sun

Sophie Tighe from News UK started the day off by exploring how The Sun reaches a new audience on Snapchat, often one that has never picked up the newspaper or even visited its website. She shared how the publisher adapts content for its Discover channel, ranging from celebrity gossip to political coverage, and how it has built up a relationship with the young consumers that make up Snapchat’s audience.

“During the process of building it, they found they were playing the game more than they were programming it, which meant they knew they were on to something.”
Tony Foggett, CEO, Code Computer Love

During his talk, Tony Foggett from Code Computer Love described how a side project at the digital agency designed to showcase its search data capabilities turned into a number one app with 6m downloads and 500m plays. He walked us through the making of The Higher Lower Game, how the firm used agile development and iteration to perfect it, and some of the mistakes the team learned from along the way.

“Who better to create content for your campaigns than customers themselves, who love your products and your brand. The influencer-created content is just getting so powerful, so beautiful, because the creative tools that you have on your smartphone are getting more powerful every year. You’ve seen the Shot on iPhone billboards – that campaign’s a testament to how great those cameras are.”
Jules Lund, founder, Tribe Group

Jules Lund from Tribe Group sang the praises of micro-influencers, those with between 3,000 and 100,000 followers on social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, and how they can take mass marketing messages and turn them into personal content that reaches huge numbers of consumers. He also explained how the market is evolving from just influencers as a channel to influencer generated content, which can provide brands with a powerful resource for marketing their products.

“90 per cent of our customers are under 35, and because of their demographics and their profile, we know they’re global, they’re very active on social media, but most importantly, mobile is the one thing that’s really important to them. They’ve grown up with mobile devices, and it’s natural to them to transact on a mobile device.”
Breffni Horgan, head of product & design, Hostelworld

Breffni Horgan from Hostelworld spoke about the importance of mobile to travel brands, where the personal nature of the device offers an opportunity to provide users with real utility and value while giving brands a direct line to consumers. She provided us with an overview of how Hostelworld is continually evolving the products and services it offers through its app, and how that’s driving both reach and engagement.

“If you have, for example, a website, a CRM, even a physical location, and you’re not using that to drive the data that you’re using on your mobile experience, you’re missing out.”
Simon Baptist, director of business development, EMEA, Tune

Tune specialises in helping brands optimise their app marketing, and Simon Baptist offered insights into how it’s not good enough to simply be mobile-first anymore, you have to be mobile-best. While billions is set to be spent on driving app installs next year, Simon argued that brands need to focus on engagement and retainment if they truly want to connect with customers.

“As we approach GDPR, people like telcos that have that first party relationship with a customer will be the lead that other people have to follow. There’s a value exchange in process and a trust already established.”
Martin Weller, managing director, Weve

Martin Weller from Weve addressed one of the topics that everyone in the room had questions on: the looming spectre of GDPR, and how it will affect the digital marketing ecosystem. Martin suggested that while ad tech firms may struggle, companies that have access to first-party data will be able to leverage their relationship with customers and maintain their ability to use data to target advertising.

“Clients don’t always have the opportunity to have completely bespoke video content, or a dedicated creative agency working for them, but working with the editorial and design team, we can take assets created for print or online, whether it’s a video ad, or just still images or text – and make them more dynamic, adapting it to the platform.”
Milton Elias, head of mobile & video, News UK

Speaking alongside Sophie Tighe, News UK’s head of mobile & video Milton Elias explained how the publisher partners with brands on Snapchat, and how News UK works with clients to create content that suits both the mobile format and today’s fast-paced millennial consumers.

“The right communication channel is the one your customer wants, not the one that want to give them.”
Kevin Britt, country manager, UK and Ireland, Infobip

Messaging platforms offer brands a hugely valuable channel to reach consumers on a one-to-one basis, as Infobip’s Kevin Britt detailed in his talk. SMS and over-the-top messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Line are increasingly preferred over email, and offer brands unique features that they can use to offer consumers a richer experience, from in-app payments to chatbots.

“We did a great job up to the booking, but once the customer got to the destination, we didn’t really communicate with them. We tried to understand what kind of data we had to help augment their travelling experience, and we asked customers what we could give them that would make their travelling experience better. The top answers were weather, recommendations for things to do, and places to eat.”
Breffni Horgan, head of product & design, Hostelworld

As part of her presentation, Breffni Horgan from Hostelworld explored how the brand’s app gave them an opportunity to extend their contact with customers beyond the traditional transaction, and how customer feedback and data drove their ventures into new functionality, from the MyTrips information portal to the ‘Speak The World’ translation feature.

“It’s not out of the realm of possibility for a brand to be able to tell when you’re on that final five, 10 per cent of battery, send you a push notification inviting you in and letting you charge your phone wirelessly while you get a discounted coffee.”
Ben Phillips, global head of mobile, Mediacom

Ben Phillips from Mediacom closed out the days presentations by asking the question of if mobile had reached its perfect peak with the release of the iPhone X, which seems to bring together several of the most cutting-edge innovations and offer marketers rich new opportunities for personalised interactions with consumers in the always-online world.