David Eastman, The Times (Raconteur)

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

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JWT, whose clients include Diageo, Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft, recently appointed worldwide digital director David Eastman to oversee the global agency’s push into digital. He talks ‘personal media’ and tipping points with James Silver in New York.

The idea came out of advertising giant JWT’s branch in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Entered for last week’s Cannes Lions festival, the campaign for Centennial Communications, was entitled Phonestar and is perhaps best described as ‘American Idol - on a mobile phone’.

4,000 participants took part in a talent show in which they sung down their mobile phone-lines. Sony BMG then picked ten finalists, from which the Puerto Rican public chose a winner – using their mobiles.

While the Phonestar campaign can hardly be described as high-tech, the fact that JWT are chalking it up as a success story for mobile marketing signals that the company is finally getting serious about the medium as an advertising platform.

Indeed, the agency are currently working on another mobile campaign for an “iconic” New York brand, although they won’t reveal the client’s name.

For more than a decade, mobile had routinely been predicted to be the industry’s ‘new frontier’ - a brave new world in which brands and the latest technology interacted with consumers on a 24/7 basis. Yet, the years passed, and mobile marketing remained the Cinderella of advertising platforms, a nerdish add-on best left to digital micro-agencies.

However, according to JWT’s incoming worldwide digital director, all that is poised to change. Speaking in the company’s swish Lexington Avenue offices in New York – recently fitted with new TV and animation studios - David Eastman says the medium’s moment has come.

“People have been talking about [mobile marketing] being ‘on the cusp’ for a very long time indeed, since 1998 or 1999,” he says. “But the promise, back then, was so far ahead of the technological reality, that it turned the consumer off for quite some time. Now the technology for what more and more people refer to as ‘personal media’ is beyond where everyone thought it was going to be and the marketing department of every client that we have is asking ‘And what can we do over mobile?’”

And don’t just take Eastman’s word for it. Leading marketers in the US are starting to say the same thing too. “We’ve reached a tipping point,” Domino Pizza advertising executive Rob Weisberg told a recent edition of Business Week magazine. “Marketers, especially consumer brands, have to take mobile seriously now. You have to be where your customer works, lives and plays.”

But why is ‘personal media’ suddenly on the radar of advertising mega-agencies and big-name brands? Eastman replies that a number of important factors have converged to create “a tipping point”. Among them, he cites vastly-improved technology, what he calls the “real-timeness” of the medium, typified by the popularity of social-networking and the fact that “a device that is with you all the time becomes very compelling to advertisers.”

The real “game-changer”, he argues, has been the success of Apple’s iPhone. “There is a clear demand from clients now and the iPhone is responsible for that. In the US, iPhone only has 8% of the mobile phone market. But the twist is that 43% of all mobile Web-browsing, here, is done on iPhones. The iPhone’s operating system was so immensely usable that ever since it arrived the industry talks in terms of ‘before the iPhone’ and ‘after the iPhone’.”

Global agencies like JWT, built for ‘traditional’ media campaigns, have come in for flak for being slow to respond to digital, including mobile. “JWT isn’t at the forefront of this,” says a well-placed observer. However, Eastman, who has only been with the company for four months, explains that there were perfectly good historical reasons that mobile, in particular, remained sidelined.

“If I build content for the Web, I have to think about which browsers are going to be used to view it. There are only four or five browsers and you have to test your content through those, as well as the latest and earlier versions. From a mobile perspective, there are about seventeen browsers, but each handset works with them in a different way. So if a client came to us and said I want to develop a mobile campaign, we’d have to do about 600 or 700 tests. And that situation only gets worse the more phones there are.

“So it’s the lack of uniformity, and in the US, at least, no single carrier covers the entire country. If I take my device and go from here to Kansas, even though this is a T Mobile device, the chances are in Kansas I’m going to be roaming with AT&T and their rules for how they interpret [technical] information are different. These hurdles are the reasons why it’s taken so long for personal media to happen. But now there’s an irresistible urge for brands to be in this media space and the industry will find a way to make it work. So the next thing you’ll see, will be greater uniformity of browsers.”

Also around the corner will be a way for consumers to make ‘micro-payments’ with their mobile phones, says Eastman.

“The ability for mobiles to make in-store or in-situation micro-payments will really change things. These devices will end up replacing your credit card – your card details will be stored on its SIM card. The micro-payment aspect was what took so long to crack – in other words, it cost so much in terms of the software needed and the hardware needed by the retailer that for anything less than £10 it was never worth it. Now, it’s at the point where it’s ubiquitous and very cheap.

“Ten years ago people used to talk in wistful terms about your phone being a ‘digital wallet’. I’m not sure anyone really believed it back then, but now we do. That’s why there’s more potential with these devices than with anything else.”

(Published by Raconteur for The Times, 1st July 2009)

Posted by James Silver - On Wednesday, July 01, 2009

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