The role of creative in mobile marketing

Mobile marketing calls for a different kind of creativity. Marching into your creative agency, showing them a tiny banner spec and saying, “Good luck” is not going to get you much.

What seems to be emerging as we listen to some of the mobile pioneers at the Mobile Marketing Forum this week is that creativity lives in different places in the mobile marketing world. The challenges for any creative team looks more like these:

“How do we engage with our consumers in new ways?”
“How do we take our wider campaign themes and brand values and give them a new spin with the mobile user in mind?”
“How do we integrate some mobile participation into what we’re doing online or in traditional media?”
“What would that call to action be like if it initiated a mobile interaction?”

These are open briefs that any creative team should relish. The key is to get them to the table early, at the strategy stage, and to bring in the whole brand team at the same time.

As Paul Gunning, President of Tribal DDB put it at the Mobile Marketing Forum, “Creative in mobile is about creative uses of the medium. About finding really unique ways for brands to make use of this personal device.”

This is clearly beyond the normal concept of ‘words and pictures’ creative.

Good ideas will come from all directions. From the media planners, the people who look after out-of-home, the TV agency, the PR team. The nominal ‘creatives’ can harvest all of this and invent new ways to engage with consumers. But only if they’re up for that challenge.

There will be creative teams who aren’t up for it. Just as there will be brands who aren’t up for it. They’ll be left behind by those who are.

Creatives and brand owners who see the mobile screen merely as a smaller canvas are missing the point. In fact the canvas metaphor itself is obsolete when it comes to mobile. This is about creative dialogue – a new medium with massive potential to deepen your relationship with your consumers in ways traditional marketing could only dream of.

The pioneers are getting stuck in now. Are you?