What we learnt at the MMA Forum London

Here’s a roundup of our highlights from the MMA Forum London:

As winners of ‘Unilever’s Next Big Thing’ we are big fans of VP Sarah Mansfield and enjoyed her opening remarks. Looking outside of our industry and considering the role of social and mobile on the recent General Election was particularly interesting.

Next up was Rob Weston from M&S. They have started to use geo-targeted mobile display to increase footfall. They also have a measurement and attribution solution in place which has enabled them to prove the value of the activity back to the wider business. Their use of dynamic creative, targeted by customer segment, was particularly interesting to us here at Fluid Ads.

Rob went on to talk about how they have used mobile, wifi and point of sale data to record in store customer journeys. He showed the resulting heat maps and explained how that insight has helped shape their store design and customer experience. M&S are clearly at the start of a journey but it was good to see a much-loved high street brand doing such interesting work.

Which brand has the most retail stores in the world? Starbucks? McDonalds? Wrong. It’s Subway. However, Shell is a close second.

There are two things that Shell’s Oliver van Bilson is excited about right now. One is connected cars and the other is self-driving cars. If you own a Jaguar or Land Rover that’s less than two years old, you can already take advantage of some of Shell’s connected car technology. Their mobile payment service – ‘Fill Up & Go’ allows you to pay for your fuel via the in-car app without getting out. If you live in Turkey you can even place a food order from behind the wheel and it will be brought out to you on the forecourt.

Shell’s self-driving technology is still a bit further away; however, we had a glimpse into the future courtesy of a promotional video. The whole thing was very glossy and there were some neat features. However, watching a ‘driver’ turn away from the steering wheel to use their laptop whilst hurtling down a motorway remains unnerving…

Tech aside, it looks like Shell plans to really up their food game. Apparently, it’s going to be goodbye sweaty sandwiches and hello bistro- with all ingredients sourced within five miles of the outlet. We’ll see…

Ian James from Verve showed us some research that they’ve done into how ‘Generation Z’ (people that have been born since the internet arrived) feel about mobile marketing. The main takeaway was that these guys are completely happy with sharing their data as long as the resulting marketing is of a high quality- get it wrong and they are an unforgiving bunch. One of the talking heads said that they would “…rather lose their wallet than their phone”- fair enough.

Our favourite speaker of the day had to be Ed Relf from Laundrapp. Ed’s a great speaker, his business is flying and he’s generous with his content. There were lots of great insights, not so much about mobile specifically, but more about marketing in general. Here are the bits that we took away:

• They aim to acquire customers before they form their ‘laundry habit’. That means getting to millennials who have moved out but haven’t bought a washing machine yet- Ed hates washing machines
• Getting the first order is easy- it’s the second order that counts, once you get that you can be more confident of a healthy LTV. Second order CPA is therefore vital for – Laundrapp.
• Their data shows that LTV differs by age and location so they have second order CPA’s split by segment
• They aim to ‘polish every customer interaction’. Their customer facing colleagues are therefore particularly important.
• Ed believes that two or three marketing channels will deliver for every business- it’s just about finding the right ones. Even as a disruptive tech company, they invest in ATL- Direct Mail is one of their best channels
• Finally, we really enjoyed the panel discussion with Keith Moor from Santander and Dan Hagen from Carat. They covered a lot of ground and concentrated on measurement and attribution for a portion of the discussion. Fluid Ads got particularly excited when Keith spoke about creative.

He said: “…we’ve experimented with content by device and its performed well- however, that demands that we produce a lot of content”. It was a convenient note to finish on as the Fluid Ads platform makes it easy to produce great-looking, data-driven HTML5 ads at scale.

Please do drop us a line if you share Santander’s challenge – maybe we can help!

Thanks to the MMA for a great event. We’re looking forward to the next one.