Agency CEOs: 2013 Planning Is About Mobile Integration

The year of mobile has come and gone — though we may never know which year it was exactly. So what comes next? Why the year of mobile integration of course.

When we asked three senior agency executives what their top 2013 planning issue is (not mentioning mobile), all three came back with variations on the same response: Mobile channel integration is a key next step for the industry.

Read their responses below.

Dan Khabie, CEO, and Gretchen Cordova, VP Digital Marketing Strategy, Digitaria

“Our biggest planning challenge for 2013 continues to be convincing clients of the importance of a cross-platform strategy across all levels of their marketing messages. We still find many marketers who feel a terrific website is all they need, or just some hot new app, when in reality attention spans are shrinking and cross so many different platforms and devices, you need to be everywhere. The biggest challenge for all of us, I think, is that you have to be able to effectively communicate in a short period of time and potentially very small visual area.”

Lori Goldberg, CEO, Traffiq

“Digital planning in 2013 is going to focus around taking campaigns beyond the banner and focus on the integration of advertising across all digital devices. There is no need for statistics when it comes to the question of how the use of smartphones has increased over the past few years.

It is going to be essential for planners to be able to run campaigns across all platforms and, more importantly, to be able to run a cohesive campaign that is easily recognizable to the end user regardless of the device they are using. One of biggest obstacles right now is the varying creative requirements when it comes to tablets. While there has been a move in the industry to standardize the inventory for smartphone devices, this is still not the case when it comes to tablets, making it more costly for advertisers. Publishers need to move toward making the process more streamlined for planners and this includes not only standardization, but offering ‘bundles’ or ‘packages’ that include inventory across mobile devices as well as traditional inventory.”

JiYoung Kim, SVP, Ansible

“As an industry, we’ve done a good job advocating the importance of mobile, but we’ve got a ways to go to unveil the totality of experiences new technologies make possible in the future. Mobile, like many of its emerging media brethren, is heading into a phase where we are pushing both its increased integration into overall marketing campaigns, as well as for new, specialized opportunities only possible with mobile. In 2013, we mobile leaders will be tasked with further harnessing the connections that are made possible with mobile devices, while improving on the infrastructure that marketers need to make new insights actionable – particularly, measurement.”

More AdExchanger “Industry Reactions”…