CP&B Boulder, is the agency behind Emoji Ordering. A successful entrant in the 2016 New York Festivals International Advertising Awards®, successfully taking home multiple awards in Mobile competitions.

Richard Giuliani, Experience Director and one of the leaders in our Interactive Technical department and the rest of the team, take us through their thoughts on using Mobile in advertising.

NYF: What are the most important factors to think about when planning how to successfully integrate mobile into a campaign?

Richard Giuliani:

Mobile First We’re seeing a large portion of our audience using mobile as a primary channel for interacting with us, with a significant amount of sales moving into the mobile space. Given the rapid rise of mobile adoption, it’s now critical for us to think of the mobile experience first and foremost, rather than simply as an auxiliary add-on experience that we need to check off to complete an integrated campaign. New ideas open-up when you put mobile at the “center” of a concept. For example, the Domino’s Zero Click Ordering mobile app gave us a new way to answer crucial questions: “what’s the fastest way to order?”; “what’s the most convenient way to order?” Obviously mobile devices are relevant here as many of our customers always have the device on them or nearby, so it’s a natural. We then looked at mobile ordering and asked “how we can we strip this down to its essential components” and that led us to the Zero Click idea, where a user simply launches the app, a countdown timer begins and their favorite order is placed with no other interactions required.

Utility Platforms such as Emoji and Zero Click Ordering raise another important factor that is important when creating successful mobile experiences: utility. We find that our most successful mobile concepts provide a tangible benefit for our customers. They allow users to do something that then returns value rather than simply interrupting the user to push a message on them. It can be a difficult challenge to figure out how to go a step further into utility but it’s worth it.

Embrace Mobile’s Unique Characteristics Some of the best mobile ideas look to the unique characteristics of mobile and leverages those aspects as core components of the concept. Obvious examples are the use of GPS location technologies; Pokémon Go relies on GPS to power the whole experience. For Domino’s, we felt that embracing the constantly evolving Emoji culture was an interesting opportunity. But instead of just doing something cute with Emojis, we looked to see how we could leverage them so our customers could have fun yet do something valuable: in this case, order their favorite meal.

Simplicity Mobile experiences are challenging to design. For example, you often deal with small screens and time-crunched users who are looking for a quick experience. This should change the nature of the narrative or the interactive experience. Design must be simple, clear and immediately engaging. The concept must be quickly evident and obvious methods for users to participate must be available.

NYF: Does Mobile have scale, and can it be used to reach targeted audiences?

Richard Giuliani: To put it simply, yes and yes. We’ve seen success connecting a range of brands with targeted audiences through mobile innovations. They allow for the potential, if executed relevantly and appropriately, to send the right message, to the right consumer, at the right time.

NYF: Can Mobile be used to help build a brand, or is this just an added-on channel?

Richard Giuliani: Done with sophistication, I believe mobile can help build a brand but it might not be obvious how this can happen. To take an obvious example of an ineffective method, I personally find that simply injecting a mobile banner ad within a mobile app will be a poor method for brand building. I doubt many folks click/tap on these advertisements and mostly treat them as noise to ignore as they try and interact with the primary experience. Fortunately, I believe a lot of advertisers realize this isn’t an effective method. That said, mobile has been incredibly helpful for Domino’s in positioning the brand as a progressive, tech-forward company. We like to joke that “Domino’s is a technology company that happens to deliver pizza.” We find that by creating a variety of different tech-savvy experiences, many of which are mobile, consumers begin to recognize that Domino’s plays well within these emerging spaces. We look to embrace the unique characteristics of each space rather than simply pushing old messaging methods into these exciting new mediums. People see when you do it right. And when you do it right over many platforms, apps and experiences, consumers give you credit. It’s kind of a holistic, halo-like effect that cumulatively builds up from all the efforts a brand creates for these new spaces. The key is always creativity.

NYF: In your opinion, what’s the best use of Mobile advertising recently (other than yours)?

Richard Giuliani: That’s a hard question as I think interesting uses of mobile are still emerging. If I had pick something that is more like a “traditional” ad, rather than creating an entire branded mobile app or something similar, I found the banner ads for the Showtime show Homeland interesting. I liked them because instead of a simple “tap or click” call to action, they asked you to “tap to zoom” which was intriguing because it leverages a unique aspect of mobile devices: the pinch and zoom effect. Essentially, zooming into the ad revealed additional content. It was just video, but I liked that they embraced the pinch and zoom aspect of mobile devices and had a little fun with that without having to build an app.