Marketing Week 6/3/13- 'There's no end to the possibilities of digital, but no end to the problems'

A report on Marketing Week 6/3/13 debates the endless possibilites of digital media, yet the problems it is causing industry businesses, as they have to keep they are in great compeition with each other to try and come up with new ways to impress the consumer.

'More recently, Tumblr announced its plans to offer brands promoted posts on its mobile properties in a bid to monetise its growing smartphone audience, which has quadrupled in the last six months alone.
On the face of it, this sounds exciting news for brand-side marketers given it’s another targeted audience that can be contacted while on the go. But I can’t help but feel the proposed offering is indicative of the problems facing brands as the worlds of social and mobile merge, or we enter the “so-mo” era.
For example, the proposed Tumblr proposition sounds similar to Twitter’s mobile mobile promoted posts offering in the first instance. But what will be interesting to see is the targeting capabilities Tumblr will provide on mobile.
Twitter’s mobile service lets brands target by location and makes sense as it’s a more text-based medium, which could be used by brands to provide directions to their stores for instance. However, Tumblr is a more image-based offering, similar to Instagram, and its primary input method is likely to be a device’s camera.
From here it’s clear to see how the next wave of “so-mo” platforms will require creative thinking and strategic guile to be effectively used as a marketing engagement channel.'

This report stresses the importance of mobile availability, and how much more successful an website/service is if it is available as an app for those on the go. However businesses are now trying to find a way of advertising through these mediums also, as mobile apps are the best way of targeting everyone. We can really use this information as we have created an app of which the whole point is to be used on the go, as important things such as travel details are available on the go. An interesting term has cropped up in this report that we would like to look more into, 'so-mo'.