The changing landscape of mobile marketing

It's no secret that the advent of social media and Internet technologies has caused a massive shift in the way that business is done around the world. While opening up vast opportunities, the plethora of options out there today makes it very easy for marketing to lose control over messages.

While Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are seeing phenomenal growth globally, local platforms and mobile applications are a force to be reckoned with as well, especially in Asia. As new technologies continue to blur the lines between media and the social graph, marketers need to learn how to build balanced campaigns that leverage these new developments. Marketers have to adopt new ways to talk to their audiences, and this in turn is evolving branding and communications strategy.

Nowhere is this more the case than with mobile devices, which have far more affinity for the internet and social media than any other device. Mobile has taken over from the desktop as the primary site for online social activity, and the recent high-value acquisitions of OMGPOP (creator of DrawSomething) by Zynga and Instagram by Facebook point to the direction in which change is headed.

No one would have guessed, even as recently as five years ago, that two, mobile-only apps, developed and available for iOS and Android devices would be the most talked about and most-highly valued companies of recent times.

The cost of these acquisitions reflects the high price that companies are willing to pay in order to make their inroads into social networks, to own offerings that are of instant appeal to the public.

And the appeal of these two apps lies purely in the social space. Instagram is about content creation, but also about instantaneous sharing of that content. And DrawSomething’s attraction is that it is a game that almost anyone and everyone can play, at their own time, while engaging with friends and family.

The exact implications of these deals will only appear with time. Savvy mobile marketers have been taking advantage of mobile, and its unique position at the junction of social and the internet – and many of those campaigns have run in Asia.

The landscape may be changing – as it does from day to day – and today’s uncertainty for mobile marketing can only lead to a better, more engaged, smarter tomorrow.

Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director, Mobile Marketing Association Asia

The views expressed in this column are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect this publication's view, and this article is not edited by Singapore Business Review. The author was not remunerated for this article.