P2PX Preview: Encouraging Brands to Be Mobile-First

Consumers with smartphones check their phone 150 times a day, and 20% of that time is spent on Facebook and Instagram, says Dave Sommer, director of CPG, shopper marketing and e-commerce at Facebook. In a day, he adds, nearly 80% of consumers aged 18 to 44 have a smartphone with them in all but two hours.“True it up,” he says. “One of the asks I have, one of the calls to action, is really for marketers, for shopper marketers, to spend as much time thinking about being mobile-first as consumers spend on mobile phones.”On Oct. 3 at the Path to Purchase Expo in Minneapolis, Sommer will deliver a keynote presentation titled “Driving Sales in a Mobile World.” Facebook, the leading social platform, dedicates all of its time and energy to mobile now and is setting out to help its brand and retailer partners achieve their goals over mobile because that’s where the consumers are, Sommer says. “That’s why this keynote is important – because we’re going to get into the how.”Sommer aims to highlight some of the work they’re doing with “most of the largest retailers,” although he couldn’t name names at the time.“We are working on actual, turnkey shopper marketing programs where brands and retailers can work together in three areas. One is targeting, so being able to target to retail shoppers. Two, serving them the right ads, so knowing what they’ve purchased in the past and their interests. And the last piece is measuring it in brick-and-mortar stores.”Facebook has the ability to measure “store visits” based on when a user saw an ad and if they physically travelled to the store via Facebook’s location components. The presentation will highlight these features and other tools like its dynamic ads that can personalize a shopping experience for users. For retailers, there’s “store sales optimization,” a machine learning feature that links online and offline. It is privacy based, anonymized, Sommer says, where Facebook targets ads to the right consumer and matches up who saw it, if a purchase was made and lines up the correct attribution.Instagram is another example of where products can be tagged in a post and users can click to buy. Sommer says Instagram also has power as a discovery platform.“For some marketers it can be daunting at first, but the reality is for the most part, good mobile marketing is just good marketing, but there are some best practices that we’ll go ahead and share at this keynote, and we will talk specifically about some of the vehicles that Facebook enables for brands and retailers to come together and reach shoppers.”Sommer says Facebook is also running volume-response tests, seeing how a campaign fares when mobile is put at the center of the plan essentially asking: Can TV levels of investment be put into a mobile-first campaign and generate TV levels of sales?“We’ll share results on that in the future,” he says, “but the good news is that the results we’re seeing are trending very positively that if you do follow this advice, and you do think mobile-first and you do reach people where they are and you invest in a big way then you will see sales volume and actual feet in the store.”TV has a place, he affirms. Virtual reality also has a place. “At Facebook, we believe that VR is the next big computing platform, and it’s a big part of our 10-year plan.”He says it’s still early for marketers, but brands should invest and experiment now. Sephora, for example, integrated augmented reality into a Facebook ad where a user clicks an ad calling them to “try on” makeup and with an AR overlay they can see how lipstick or mascara looks on them. There’s a button in that full-screen camera directly linking to purchase.

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