From its Mobile Center of Innovation at the Cannes Lions Festival, the Mobile Marketing Association yesterday released an interactive creative framework on how to build and execute effective mobile campaigns. The insights included are the result of an in-depth analysis of over 450 global mobile campaigns, including the winners in the MMA’s annual Smarties™ Global Mobile Awards Program.

The study explored a number of brands and local innovators with successful mobile campaigns from around the world, including  from marketers such as Delta, Dunkin’ Brands, Mercedes-Benz, Nike, O2, Samsung, Range Rover, Ray Ban, The Coca-Cola Company and Zyrtec, among others. The analysis examined the innovative mobile creative approaches of successful brands across some of mobile’s unique attributes, uncovering key commonalities and differences and revealing five key benchmarks, as follows

The “Brand Activation Remote”

Mobile is the consumer’s remote control to activate engagement with a brand. Using mobile as a brand campaign unifier, bringing access, experience and commerce together, is an unbeatable combination to keep consumers constantly connected along the path to purchase. The unique opportunity here is for advertisers to use devices and campaigns to close the loop on prospects and leads, drive conversion, commerce and loyalty and bring brand experiences closest to their consumers. 

There is no time like the present

It is said that timing is everything – and mobile brings that to life with the ability to engage and motivate consumers in the present moment and on their terms. From real-time shared experiences to native executions, location-based incentives and dynamic ad serving, mobile’s power is that it’s personal, pervasive, and is at proximity with users. 

Content rules

Across a number of the mobile campaigns that were studied, compelling content was at the heart. Marketers gave consumers unique, shareable and first access content, games, music, stories and collectables. The common thread among all of these was a desired and immersive set of interactions that put the consumer at the center of the brand story. In some cases, the mobile device was actually the unifier across all of a brand’s communication platforms, allowing consumers to move freely across and among a brand’s assets according to their requirements and on their own terms.

 Enable bespoke consumer experiences

When consumers personally connect to some aspect of the brand and tailor that experience to their needs, preferences and tastes, everybody wins. Clearly, some brands are better able to customize than others; but again, results show that the ability to personalize brand communications with relevancy delivers a more meaningful response and depth of interaction. Brands can invite consumers in, make them feel heard and achieve significant impact when consumers can exert their preferences to create their own unique experience with a brand.

A toolkit to get things done

Brands that can deploy tools on mobile devices that provide utility and save time can win in a big way. The big winners in the study used tools or calculators – some that learned what consumers liked –  and tech integrations that provided unique brand interactions or leveraged an ability to transact on-the-spot. All these enhance the consumer brand experience in a unique and useful way.

“Creativity and innovation are fundamental to brands being successful with mobile. These benchmarks provide marketers and their agencies with a concise framework on how to think more strategically about mobile across the purchase funnel as well as how to leverage uniqueness that only mobile can provide,” said in a statement Greg Stuart, CEO at the MMA. “We hope this will stimulate new ideas and help the industry continue to raise the bar on mobile creativity, effectiveness and further innovation.”