Why Digital Marketers Need to Pay Attention to Caine’s Arcade

Last week I presented my list of Seven 2012 Digital Imperatives at the Digital Marketing for Financial Services Summit in Toronto.

The event was a great success, attracting more than 100 professionals actively working in the financial services market and featured digital marketing thought leaders from across North America.

As one might guess, one of the underlying themes of my presentation was innovation and how mature industries, like financial services, can escape the rut of glacially-slow incremental change.

Which leads me to the story of Caine Monroy and his arcade.

Caine is a 9 year old boy in Los Angeles, California. His father owns an auto parts shop in East LA. Caine built a cardboard arcade in the front of his father’s shop over his summer holidays. Over the last few weeks, that cardboard arcade and the short film produced about it has become an Internet sensation – generating a fair share of earned media, widespread praise, and more than $400,000 in donations toward Caine’s college education and a foundation created in his honour. As a digital marketer, what fascinates me is how this achievement came about and how it relates to all industries, including financial services.

Why has Cain’s Arcade been so effective?

The director of the video, Nirvan Mullick, and Caine focused on the right things and applied a number of my 2012 Digital Imperatives.

1. They focused on the Mobile Connected Consumer. The Caine’s Arcade web site is mobile optimized, allowing people to dive into the full experience from anywhere at any time. It includes the ability to donate to Caine’s college fund, incenting people to action.  It’s 2012 and mobile is digital. Marketers must count on consumers accessing their content via a mobile device.

2. They focused on Social Conversations and not Platforms. The Caine’s Arcade web site and social media pages – Facebook, Twitter, and Vimeo – post updates from people from around the world allowing them to share their stories; this input is unsolicited and had an amplifying effect. These multiple conversations are allowed to flourish and evolve. The resulting “Social Conversations” are in fact real interactive conversations – versus a stream of broadcast-style messages focused ‘on brand.’ Digital marketers need to do a much better job of understanding this balance with our social conversations.

3. Lastly, the entire Cain’s Arcade experience is rooted in Transparency and Authenticity. The film documents Caine’s motives for creating his arcade and Nirvan’s motives for capturing it on film. Authenticity is one of the foundations of trust. In this situation, trust is the motivation and the transparency provided was key in the fundraising effort. It should be noted that the project did not begin with the objective to fund Caine’s college education or to establish a foundation. It was simply the realization of a young boy’s dream.  Digital marketers need to first establish trust in their marketing efforts through transparency and authenticity, as trust is key to driving consumer action.

Mobile is the New Black

By that I mean – this year is the year of mobile.

Remember how everyone for the last five years had said that ‘this year’ would be the year of mobile? Well, it’s finally happened now here in North America. Eighty percent of all Canadians have a mobile phone and roughly half of us now carry smartphones. The case is similar in the US where half of Americans have smartphones and mobile phone penetration is over 100 percent. Forrester recently reported that mobile will be your customers preeminent digital touchpoint.

Sixty percent of smartphone owners have downloaded apps. Those who download apps downloaded 12 on average. Many see their smarphone as their ‘co-pilot for life’.

In the past few years, we have seen mobile become a significant factor in local search, product comparison, shopping, social sharing, and in all aspects of digital content consumption. On their mobile device consumers can now do everything that they previously could only do on a tethered desktop computer. This, of course, has some serious consequences for both the PC industry and how we’ve come to approach digital marketing.

Mobile has a number of unique aspects:

• Mobile is the first ‘personal’ mass medium. It instantly connects you to what matters most in your life.
• Mobile is ‘permanently connected’. It’s there when you need it – ready to send or receive timely information.
• Mobile is always carried. Most people will not leave their house unless they have their keys, wallet, and their phone.
• Mobile has a built in payment channel. You have the ability to precisely determine ROI on an individual level.
• Mobile is available on demand to capture or create images, text, photos, video, voice, music.
• Mobile devices provide the most accurate audience tracking information.
• Mobile captures the social context when it happens. You know where your friends are, how they feel, and what they have seen – when it happens.
• Mobile enables augmented reality. This is not the sci-fi concept. It’s the additional contextual data layer that mobile can add to your experience in real-time. Think of it as a digital interface to the real world.

But, how does all this affect digital marketing?

Today consumers are mobile. Mobile must be your starting point for marketing planning and in understanding consumer interactions. In order to be most effective in marketing to consumers, your efforts must meaningfully incorporate one or more of these unique aspects. Online technology platforms, brand initiatives, and advertising campaigns must realize that. As of right now consumers will most likely experience your brand via a mobile device.

On top of all this, society has changed. Today consumers seek authenticity from the brands they engage with and reciprocity from those they interact with online. Consumers use their mobile and social interconnectedness to inform and empower their actions.

So, what are the implications for you brand? For one, make sure your brand’s mobile strategy does not begin and end at publishing an App. On the tactics side, begin by establishing a basic mobile web presence. Not having a mobile landing page for your site in 2012 is like sending consumers to a 404 page. Ideally, businesses should strive for mobile experiences which are responsive and address the user’s device in context.

I’ll be honest…this is not actually the year of mobile – it’s now the mobile era.

It no longer makes sense for you to conduct your efforts and treat mobile as an ‘add on’ or a ‘nice to have.’ The majority of people now carry these powerful, connected, convergent devices in our pockets. The smartphone is the most personal of devices and media channels out there. Because of this intimacy, it makes sense to treat mobile marketing interactions with greater care, contextualization, and personalization than with other forms of digital marketing. Mobile devices are the remote control for people’s socially interconnected lives. To be successful, marketers must build digital marketing initiatives from the ground up to reflect this.