Terms like “the Year of Mobile” and “mobile-first” have become easy jokes for speak­ers at dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing con­fer­ences – and for good rea­son. 2015 was the year mobile search­es for­ev­er sur­passed desk­top queries, but what’s in store for 2016?

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Momen­tol­ogy sur­veyed 50 mar­ket­ing experts from brands, agen­cies, and mobile firms to get their takes on what lies ahead for mobile mar­ket­ing in the com­ing year.

First and fore­most, these experts say mar­keters will use mobile to cre­ate bet­ter, more per­son­al­ized user expe­ri­ences in 2016 and to cement cus­tomer loy­al­ty.

In addi­tion, they antic­i­pate more loca­tion-based efforts to coin­cide with a con­tin­ued rise in local search.

Mar­ket­ing pros also think we’ll see much more aug­ment­ed and vir­tu­al real­i­ty in mobile mar­ket­ing, as well as video, includ­ing livestreams, 360-degree videos, and shop­pable videos.

Oth­er tech­nol­o­gy to look out for in mobile mar­ket­ing in 2016: mobile wal­lets, vir­tu­al per­son­al assis­tants and even push noti­fi­ca­tions. Ad block­ing will con­tin­ue to be a big buzz­word in 2016 and mar­keters will have to incor­po­rate app index­ing to ensure apps are dis­cov­er­able via organ­ic search.

For fur­ther insight into mobile mar­ket­ing in 2016, their com­ments fol­low in full.

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Brands

Tressie Lieberman, Vice President of Digital Innovation and On Demand, Taco Bell

Ease is the new loy­al­ty. We have seen such a huge rise in mobile usage because it makes life eas­i­er. You can now get any­thing you want with the tap of a but­ton. We are becom­ing loy­al to the brands that are smart­ly using tech­nol­o­gy to sim­pli­fy every aspect of our lives. The brands that do it best will cre­ate expe­ri­ences that have you ask­ing how you ever lived with­out them.

We view mobile as our flag­ship restau­rant. More than a trans­ac­tion, but a tai­lored and cus­tomized expe­ri­ence that’s tied to pref­er­ence and access from any­where at any time. By doing this, you can take the bur­den of over­whelm­ing choice off of the con­sumer and guide them to make the best deci­sions in the sim­plest way pos­si­ble.

With the consumer’s best inter­est at the fore­front of the con­ve­nient expe­ri­ence, you’ll gain their trust and loy­al­ty in 2016.

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Ram Krishnan, Chief Marketing Officer, Frito-Lay

User expe­ri­ence

We’ll see a fun­da­men­tal shift in the way mar­keters think about mobile. The tra­di­tion­al mod­el of “sell­ing” – where we might use ban­ners or pre-roll ads – is enor­mous­ly detri­men­tal to the mobile user expe­ri­ence. The expe­ri­ence on such a small screen is sacred. That’s why we’re see­ing wide­spread adop­tion of ad block­ers. We should be think­ing about how we can bet­ter serve our audi­ences on mobile – what is the util­i­ty we as mar­keters can pro­vide? Is it in the form of an app? Is it in the form of enter­tain­ing con­tent? We’re all still fig­ur­ing out, but mov­ing for­ward, when it comes to mobile, we should be think­ing of how we can serve our cus­tomers, not sell to them.

E‑commerce inte­gra­tion

But if you are sell­ing, apps and mobile-first social plat­forms will seam­less­ly inte­grate e‑commerce. As mobile users are explor­ing and find­ing inspi­ra­tion, it will con­tin­ue to become eas­i­er to pur­chase the items right then and there, such as Pinterest’s Buyable Pins and Shop­pable Insta­gram, which is pow­ered by visu­al mar­ket­ing plat­form Olapic.

Small­er social net­works

In addi­tion, social net­works are get­ting small­er, if the behav­ioral shift to mes­sag­ing plat­forms – and Facebook’s $19 bil­lion acqui­si­tion of What­sApp – is any indi­ca­tion. We don’t feel the need to broad­cast quite as broad­ly any­more.

Small­er, more pri­vate mes­sag­ing net­works like Snapchat are on the rise. Even on Insta­gram – there’s a phe­nom­e­non now called “Fin­sta­gram­ming” among teenagers. These Fin­sta­gram accounts are actu­al­ly sec­ond Insta­gram accounts that are restrict­ed to close friends; it’s a place where teens can post more freely. We want to keep our per­son­al lives more per­son­al.

And as we look at mes­sag­ing plat­forms like Kik and WeChat, we’re see­ing all sorts of fea­tures being added into the mes­sag­ing lay­er, from one-on-one brand inter­ac­tions, com­merce, payments…all sorts of real­ly, real­ly inter­est­ing devel­op­ments that have wide­spread impli­ca­tions on busi­ness­es every­where.

Uber­iza­tion

Mobile-first com­pa­nies have com­plete­ly rede­fined our expec­ta­tions when it comes to mobile – they’ve trained us to demand imme­di­a­cy and seam­less­ness. When we think of mobile, we expect the amaz­ing expe­ri­ence that we get from an Uber, or a Google or a Ven­mo. To some extent, as mar­keters, we are all suf­fer­ing from Uber envy because of the way they’ve com­plete­ly recal­i­brat­ed what con­sumers demand of their mobile expe­ri­ences.

AR/VR

With the rise of Ocu­lus and Sam­sung Gear, aug­ment­ed real­i­ty and vir­tu­al real­i­ty pow­ered by mobile will be a big trend. Expect brands to part­ner with vir­tu­al real­i­ty stu­dios to cre­ate new expe­ri­ences unlocked through prod­uct and pack­ag­ing.

Ad Block­ing

The rise of ad block­ing is large­ly a response to two major con­sumer con­cerns: pri­va­cy and intru­sive­ness. While ad block­ing has been around for years, the adop­tion has been slow — only 16 per­cent of the online U.S. pop­u­la­tion blocked ads last quar­ter.

If adop­tion of the tech­nol­o­gy con­tin­ues to increase sig­nif­i­cant­ly, there will be an impact on inven­to­ry avail­able to brands. Con­se­quent­ly, CPMs could be impact­ed due to low­ered sup­ply – sim­i­lar to what we have seen with infla­tion on TV. As a result, we will also see in-app adver­tis­ing favored; but giv­en con­sump­tion habits, this is where we are see­ing time spent shift as well.

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Sam Olstein, Global Director of Innovation, GE

I think one trend is def­i­nite­ly the con­tin­ued pro­lif­er­a­tion of mes­sag­ing and how mes­sag­ing ser­vices and mes­sag­ing plat­forms are cre­at­ing val­ue and dis­rupt­ing the indus­try where you wouldn’t think a mes­sag­ing plat­form belongs, like in the pro­fes­sion­al set­ting. And I think we’ll con­tin­ue to see more either some­body who has been dom­i­nat­ing this year like Slack take off to anoth­er lev­el or Facebook’s Mes­sen­ger ser­vice or What­sApp try to make anoth­er play that changes the dynam­ics of play­ers in that space.

I also think in gen­er­al, mobile tech­nol­o­gy will con­tin­ue to dis­rupt many dif­fer­ent indus­tries from per­spec­tives that prob­a­bly peo­ple in those indus­tries wouldn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly expect or plan for. Think about every­thing that’s hap­pen­ing in [finan­cial tech­nol­o­gy] over the last year, those inno­va­tions will only con­tin­ue to grow and accelerate…[and are poten­tial­ly] very, very dis­rup­tive to some of the tra­di­tion­al stal­warts of sec­tors like finance that they weren’t quite expect­ing.

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Agencies

Ryan Jones, Manager of Search Strategy and Analytics, SapientNitro

Two things should be on the mind of every­body doing mobile: App index­ing for your apps, and Google’s AMP plat­form for your mobile site.

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Shepherd Laughlin, Director of Trend Forecasting for J. Walter Thompson’s Innovation Group

Apple’s embrace of ad-block­ing capa­bil­i­ties in iOS 9 is rip­ping up the play­book in mobile adver­tis­ing. As con­sumers grow more accus­tomed to the mobile web, they are increas­ing­ly frus­trat­ed with tra­di­tion­al pop-up and ban­ner adver­tis­ing that inter­rupts their expe­ri­ence.

Apple’s move rec­og­nizes that many con­sumers already use ad-block­ing soft­ware and that pre­vent­ing this behav­ior will be impos­si­ble in the long term. iOS 9 is going to force mobile pub­lish­ers to work much more close­ly with adver­tis­ers to pro­duce native adver­tis­ing that con­sumers real­ly, tru­ly want to see.

Rather than putting mar­ket­ing mes­sages up front, spon­sor­ship on these new native ads will be taste­ful­ly inte­grat­ed and links to pur­chase will be sub­tle, log­i­cal exten­sions of the con­tent. The slow effort to rethink the rela­tion­ship between adver­tis­ing and edi­to­r­i­al that has been under­way for sev­er­al years will real­ly ramp up for mobile plat­forms in 2016 due to Apple’s deci­sion.

Vir­tu­al real­i­ty is a trend we see emerg­ing across tech and cul­ture in 2016 — we’re see­ing artists and oth­ers out­side the gam­ing world embrace this tech­nol­o­gy and buzz will only increase with the release of the con­sumer ver­sion of Ocu­lus Rift in 2016. With Google Card­board, Sam­sung Gear VR and oth­ers, mobile is pro­vid­ing an acces­si­ble point of entry for con­sumers inter­est­ed in try­ing out vir­tu­al real­i­ty. Due to the nov­el­ty of the tech­nol­o­gy, view­ers are quite open to con­sum­ing any sort of con­tent – includ­ing brand­ed con­tent – if it lever­ages these plat­forms in an effec­tive and impres­sive way.

Com­bin­ing the these two trends, in Novem­ber, the New York Times rolled out its first vir­tu­al real­i­ty app with con­tent from both edi­to­r­i­al and the T Brand Stu­dio. It includ­ed a sto­ry in which GE explained how its work is inspired by the nat­ur­al world while view­ers are immersed in a rapid­ly chang­ing fan­ta­sy land­scape and an ad for Mini that took the form of a VR car heist fea­tur­ing the company’s vehi­cles. The con­tent was taste­ful­ly placed along­side jour­nal­is­tic VR pieces on the Euro­pean refugee cri­sis and the Paris ter­ror attacks.

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Andy White, Social Media Director, 180LA

There isn’t mobile mar­ket­ing in 2016, there’s just mar­ket­ing. It’s one and the same.

Face­book’s mobile usage hit 80 per­cent almost a year ago and with Face­book Video Live com­ing, the growth oppor­tu­ni­ties with video will only grow and the demands on mar­keters, too.

Web­sites that don’t offer a mobile option are a rel­ic of the past. To try to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the two is to ignore the fact that your audi­ence slips between tra­di­tion­al and mobile seam­less­ly and demands the same of your mar­ket­ing.

In terms of mobile video, devel­op­ments move so fast that it’s strange to con­sid­er that this time last year, Meerkat and Periscope had­n’t even launched. It seems ridicu­lous­ly peren­ni­al to say that 2016 will be “The Year of the Video,” but with this new­found free­dom to live­cast any­thing and every­thing, any mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tive that does­n’t have a live video com­po­nent attached will quick­ly feel extreme­ly sta­t­ic.

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Jeremy Lockhorn, Vice President of Emerging Experiences and Mobile Lead, Razorfish

The impor­tance of con­text will con­tin­ue to grow. The mobile phone already knows so much about its user, enabling it to deliv­er extreme­ly rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion and expe­ri­ences at the right time in the right place.

Tech­nolo­gies that enable even more accu­rate and pre­cise loca­tion iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, like bea­cons, will make this even more pow­er­ful. We’re only begin­ning to see the full impli­ca­tions of these tech­nolo­gies. Con­sumers will increas­ing­ly expect con­text-dri­ven expe­ri­ences from their mobile devices and mar­keters who do not deliv­er will risk alien­at­ing key audi­ences.

A relat­ed trend will be usage growth of vir­tu­al per­son­al assis­tants like Siri, Google Now, Cor­tana, etc. These sys­tems will lever­age con­tex­tu­al cues from the device plus nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing and ever-increas­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence capa­bil­i­ties to pre­dict a user’s needs and deliv­er info before being asked.

Mar­keters will con­tin­ue to beat the drum on the impor­tance of viewa­bil­i­ty and com­bat­ting ad fraud. Indus­try orga­ni­za­tions are active­ly pur­su­ing stan­dards here. Mobile will take cen­ter stage. Peo­ple-based mar­ket­ing will con­tin­ue to grow as a solu­tion to mobile’s ad-serv­ing and track­ing chal­lenges. Cross-device track­ing and mea­sure­ment will fol­low as well, begin­ning to give mar­keters full vis­i­bil­i­ty into undu­pli­cat­ed reach and fre­quen­cy across TV, desk­top and mobile.

Vir­tu­al and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty point toward the next gen­er­a­tion of the human/computer inter­face. It’s ear­ly days yet, and even if Samsung’s Gear VR sold out quick­ly, one has a hard time imag­in­ing that a tech­nol­o­gy that requires a con­sumer to strap an awk­ward-look­ing mask to their face will ever go ful­ly main­stream (though stranger things have hap­pened). And regard­less of con­sumer adop­tion in 2016, these tech­nolo­gies are unlock­ing mag­i­cal new expe­ri­ences for peo­ple.

Long term, it has the poten­tial to ush­er in entire­ly new ways to expe­ri­ence con­tent (turn­ing dig­i­tal con­tent into a true expe­ri­ence) and to com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er. I think 2016 will be a year of con­tin­ued exper­i­men­ta­tion from a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive. Suc­cess sto­ries from the likes of Mar­riott, Abso­lut, HBO and more will inspire addi­tion­al (like­ly most­ly event-dri­ven) test pro­grams in 2016.

And even as mobile OS wars inten­si­fy, walls are crum­bling. Apple released an Apple Music app for Android. Microsoft is test­ing Cor­tana on both Android and iOS, etc. As hard­ware inno­va­tion begins to plateau, soft­ware and ser­vices become key dif­fer­en­tia­tors, cre­at­ing inter­est­ing cross-plat­form mod­els and oppor­tu­ni­ties.

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Jonathan Hunt, Senior Account Lead of SEO, PMG

As we con­tin­ue to make advance­ments in cross-device tar­get­ing and geo-loca­tion, it’s increas­ing­ly impor­tant that we address the oth­er side of the coin. We’re focus­ing so much on who is on mobile, we need to also address how peo­ple are using mobile. So far, we’ve defined mobile user behav­ior based on out­dat­ed cri­te­ria, invent­ed in the ear­ly days of desk­top ecom­merce.

The mobile customer’s path to con­ver­sion is both broad­er and much quick­er than the tra­di­tion­al desk­top user. Smart­phones are uti­lized to com­ple­ment and assist in more offline tasks than any oth­er device pre­vi­ous­ly. With many inter­ac­tions tak­ing less than 10 to 20 sec­onds each, how do you get your mes­sage across? How do you com­plete a con­ver­sion when your cus­tomer only has 30 sec­onds to do some­thing, but your check­out process takes 60 sec­onds to com­plete?

In 2016, it will become para­mount for us to account for that broad­en­ing of cus­tomer behav­ior in our dig­i­tal strat­e­gy. More than ever, we have to be able to find ways to fit our brands into our cus­tomers’ sto­ries, not pull them into ours.

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Brent Rangen, Director of Search, Outsmart Labs

Voice Assis­tant Search

Per­son­al­ly, I’m not very reliant on appli­ca­tions such as Siri, Cor­tana or even Google Now. How­ev­er, with heavy invest­ment – and as these sort of appli­ca­tions are built into the core func­tion­al­i­ty of mobile devices and even oper­at­ing sys­tems — it’s going to be as impor­tant as ever to ensure busi­ness­es rank here as well. Still main­ly geared towards local search, ensur­ing NAP con­sis­ten­cy and tick­ing all oth­er local rank­ing fac­tors with high qual­i­ty, con­sis­tent sig­nals is the smart play.

Deep App Index­ing

The process is sim­i­lar to pages on a web­site rank­ing, except search engines apply this to mobile apps. With over 3 mil­lion apps between Play and Apple’s mar­ket­places alone, there are many oppor­tu­ni­ties for apps to start tak­ing over web­site rank­ings in mobile SERPs. We’ve even heard addi­tion­al ben­e­fits will be giv­en to those rank­ing with Google’s App Index­ing API.

What­ev­er the tac­tics involved with tak­ing advan­tage of mobile in 2016, the most impor­tant things are going to always be to ensure prop­er track­ing and attri­bu­tion across all dig­i­tal prop­er­ties. From that point on, focus on per­for­mance and vis­i­bil­i­ty for mobile expe­ri­ences. Last­ly, opti­mize heav­i­ly for local as it is inte­gral to most mobile envi­ron­ments.

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Andrew Beckman, Chairman, Location3 Media

We believe that 2016 will be the year that mar­keters final­ly take hold of cross-device mar­ket­ing strate­gies in order to cap­ture the atten­tion of con­sumers in a dig­i­tal world that is con­sis­tent­ly derived of micro-moments, as Google first acknowl­edged in 2015.

Users con­tin­ue to move between mobile devices, some­times simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, while they go about their every­day lives. Reach­ing these users requires sophis­ti­cat­ed tar­get­ing on a local­ized lev­el in order to con­nect with con­sumers dur­ing the research, val­i­da­tion and deci­sion-mak­ing phas­es of the pur­chase process.

Fur­ther­more, we believe that local intent on the part of con­sumers will become an even big­ger fac­tor in mobile mar­ket­ing. The rise of “near me” search­es on mobile gives cre­dence to the notion that mobile users often have a high­er degree of pur­chase intent when they are search­ing for infor­ma­tion about a prod­uct or busi­ness on a mobile device. If mar­keters aren’t pre­pared to reach them dur­ing those high prob­a­bil­i­ty pur­chas­ing moments and then deliv­er a qual­i­ty user expe­ri­ence on mobile devices, they’re going to see their tar­get cus­tomers land in the hands of the com­pe­ti­tion.

Mobile mar­ket­ing in 2016 is all about con­nect­ing with the con­sumer on a local lev­el, and deliv­er­ing the right mes­sage at the right time, in order to cap­ture their hard-earned dol­lars.

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Mel Carson, CEO and Principal Strategy Consultant, Delightful Communications

Sharp­en­ing your mes­sage and tar­get­ing it with laser focus on mobile devices is going to be even more impor­tant in 2016. A recent study from Pew Research says we’re feel­ing bad about using smart­phones in social set­tings and cer­tain­ly my cir­cle of friends is lim­it­ing phone use across the fam­i­ly to have more “real” time with each oth­er.

Giv­en all the talk about moment mar­ket­ing from the likes of Google and Face­book cou­pled with con­sumers appear­ing to desire more human con­nec­tions, we could see more con­sid­ered mobile usage and so the need to cre­ate even more per­son­al­ized and time­ly cam­paigns becomes para­mount for brands to do well in 2016.

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Erin Sagin, Customer Success Manager, WordStream

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of mobile search will con­tin­ue to grow in 2016. As this space becomes more promi­nent, it’s crit­i­cal that mar­keters under­stand the con­text in which these search­es hap­pen and adapt their strate­gies accord­ing­ly.

Mobile search­es usu­al­ly occur in dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios than desk­top search­es. Mobile users tend to be mul­ti­task­ing — they’re search­ing while they’re on the go, watch­ing TV or hang­ing out with friends. This con­text, cou­pled with the fact that the human atten­tion span is rapid­ly declin­ing, pos­es a unique chal­lenge for adver­tis­ers.

Accord­ing to a study con­duct­ed by Microsoft in 2013, the aver­age adult’s atten­tion span is 8 sec­onds long. Now imag­ine one of these eas­i­ly dis­tract­ed peo­ple try­ing to find and pur­chase your prod­ucts on a mobile device. Con­sid­er how many dis­trac­tions they encounter on their phone while doing so (push noti­fi­ca­tions, emails, text mes­sages). Now, fac­tor in offline dis­trac­tions. In such a fast-paced envi­ron­ment, it’s a won­der any­one actu­al­ly man­ages to fol­low through with a con­ver­sion!

If you’re spend­ing con­sid­er­able resources on mobile paid search, this is a con­cern­ing phe­nom­e­non. How can you ensure that the traf­fic you’ve worked so hard to attain actu­al­ly fol­lows through and con­verts?

The key is to engage them ear­ly on. Use unique ad for­mats and exten­sions to encour­age prospects to take action from direct­ly with­in the results page. Once they’ve made this ini­tial invest­ment, they’ll be far more like­ly to fol­low through and con­vert.

In fact, even AdWords has acknowl­edged that adver­tis­ers need more secret weapons to hold mobile users’ atten­tion. In 2015, Google released new mobile ad for­mats for four indus­tries, designed specif­i­cal­ly to meet their searchers’ needs.

For exam­ple, hote­liers can now serve mobile ads that include var­i­ous pho­tos of their grounds and ameni­ties, cus­tomer rat­ings and reviews and book­ing infor­ma­tion. Googlers have hint­ed that unique ads are like­ly to be released for more indus­tries in 2016 and I’m eager­ly await­ing their release!

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Jonathan Adams, Chief Digital Officer, Maxus

Mobile has been and will con­tin­ue to chal­lenge media agen­cies to think more about both new datasets and new walled gar­dens.

These devel­op­ments are dri­ving the cre­ativ­i­ty and the strat­e­gy that needs to be applied to new mar­ket­ing con­tent. For exam­ple, new datasets not only show some­one’s cur­rent loca­tion, but also pro­vide more details like where they are head­ed, at what speed and via what method.

Walled gar­dens — like Face­book Mes­sen­ger, Snapchat Dis­cov­er and Twit­ter Moments — will con­tin­ue to push agen­cies to embrace new crevices to align and adapt to with their mar­ket­ing and con­tent.

Mobile has also made voice tech­nol­o­gy incred­i­bly rel­e­vant. With IoT, we see every­one these days already speak­ing to Siri or their Google app. It’s amaz­ing how fast we’ve seen voice enter the main­stream, so we can expect voice to dou­ble in use again in 2016 and to find its way into cars and appli­ances — and mar­ket­ing will be there.

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Daniel Cristo, Director of SEO Innovation, Catalyst

I’m see­ing quite a strong push by mobile devel­op­ers and agen­cies to inte­grate deep link­ing and in-app SEO best prac­tices into new apps. We’re hear­ing that search engines are focus­ing on mak­ing app list­ings much more vis­i­ble with­in tra­di­tion­al search results, so I expect 2016 to sur­prise many busi­ness­es who did­n’t expect to be com­pet­ing against apps with­in tra­di­tion­al SERPs.

I’m also fore­see­ing com­pa­nies plac­ing a greater empha­sis in app-exclu­sive con­tent. Con­tent has always been a major lure in cap­tur­ing atten­tion and offer­ing exclu­sive con­tent to app users will encour­age web users to try a com­pa­ny’s app.

One iter­a­tion of this was Ama­zon dur­ing Black Fri­day. Not only did Ama­zon have the same Black Fri­day deals in-app as on its site, but it also had app-only deals.

Mean­while, con­tent providers like Buz­zFeed, Face­book and YouTube are sign­ing con­tent cre­ators to exclu­siv­i­ty con­tracts in order to dif­fer­en­ti­ate their plat­forms. Expect some of that pre­mi­um con­tent to be used to reward the app-only com­mu­ni­ty.

There are some excit­ing things on the hori­zon such as bea­cons and VR, but I don’t think we’ll see them in the main­stream mar­ket­ing cam­paigns in 2016.

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Andrew Smith, Director, Escherman

In 2015, Ofcom offi­cial­ly declared that the UK was a smart­phone soci­ety. Two-thirds of peo­ple now own a smart­phone, using it for near­ly two hours every day to browse the Inter­net, access social media, bank and shop online. This is only set to rise in 2016 and beyond. And clear­ly this has impli­ca­tions for every aspect of the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing mix.

The key goal for dig­i­tal mar­keters will be to stop the swipe. Unless your con­tent enters a user’s social media feed, there is no chance of engage­ment. Even if you do, you have to some­how per­suade peo­ple to stop swip­ing up (or down) and do some­thing in their 8‑second atten­tion span (yes, that’s less than a gold­fish).

For SEO, unless you occu­py a top 3 slot in search results, chances are peo­ple won’t swipe up or down to check for addi­tion­al results. And if your site isn’t mobile friend­ly in the eyes of Google, then you won’t appear any­way.

The small screen real estate of the smart­phone is the key mar­ket­ing bat­tle­ground of 2016. Ignore this fact at your per­il.

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Kyle Reyes, President and CEO, The Silent Partner Marketing

Apple and a num­ber of apps will make a heavy push towards a slight­ly more ad-free ecosys­tem. This means that mar­keters and adver­tis­ers are going to have to get crafty to tai­lor that mes­sag­ing towards con­sumers in a space where ads have more of a pre­mi­um.

Live video stream­ing will become more pow­er­ful and more pop­u­lar, as we see ris­ing stars like Blab give even Periscope and Meerkat a run for their mon­ey. I would be sur­prised if we don’t see Face­book Men­tions expand beyond ver­i­fied indi­vid­u­als (or at least see Face­book open the ver­i­fi­ca­tion sta­tus to more indi­vid­u­als). As Face­book adjusts its algo­rithm to wel­come more “right now” trends and video, we’ll see this explode.

360-degree video should real­ly boom in 2016 as we see the cost of the cam­eras drop sig­nif­i­cant­ly with more play­ers enter­ing the mar­ket. Stronger edit­ing soft­ware will make it more rel­e­vant and the inte­gra­tion with both YouTube and Face­book will be a game chang­er.

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Winston Burton, VP of SEO, Acronym

In 2016, brands will fig­ure out how to improve mobile con­ver­sions rates since users don’t con­vert well on mobile.

Brands will also redesign mobile sites with user expe­ri­ence in mind. Cur­rent­ly a lot of mobile sites are not focused on the user expe­ri­ence and intent and this will change with Google’s plac­ing more impor­tance on user expe­ri­ence.

Apps will show more reg­u­lar­ly in the search results and brands need to make sure they have an app and the app is get­ting indexed due to the dom­i­nance of mobile search and usage of mobile. Some brands are also push­ing apps only for com­merce and rely­ing less on a web­site.

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Aaron Levy, Manager of Client Strategy, Elite SEM

The key to mobile suc­cess in 2016 and beyond will be a renewed focus on mobile user expe­ri­ence beyond the device; sim­ply going respon­sive has­n’t worked in the past and it won’t work going for­ward.

Gen­er­al­ly the con­ver­sion rate for mobile web hov­ers around one-third of com­put­er-based sites. Mar­keters track suc­cess on met­rics that feel forced and unnat­ur­al. It’s not that users don’t want our prod­ucts on the go, it’s that brands forc­ing them (and track­ing their expe­ri­ences) into a walled gar­den where they don’t want to be.

Suc­cess will be found in pre­sent­ing expe­ri­ences in a way that users want to expe­ri­ence. App deep link­ing, while a huge under­tak­ing, will be cru­cial for max­i­miz­ing mobile effi­cien­cy. You spent copi­ous mon­ey to make that app work and get users to down­load it, now you have to make sure they hit that expe­ri­ence dur­ing every sin­gle brand inter­ac­tion to accom­plish the goal they set out to.

Besides just opti­miz­ing the expe­ri­ence on the device, mar­keters need to remem­ber that at the core, mobile devices are a means to an end else­where. Google (and oth­er engines) have made no secret with their mar­ket­ing efforts, focus­ing on the rise in “near me” and direc­tion­al search­es as well as launch­ing store vis­it track­ing pro­grams of their own. Focus­ing on mobile-to-store track­ing will ensure the brand expe­ri­ence we cre­ate is val­ued and cap­tured at the point of sale.

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Joe Scartz, Managing Director of Digital Commerce and Integration, TPN

Bea­con net­works will grow, but also expect prox­im­i­ty-based mes­sag­ing via app net­works to pro­vide CPGs and brands a way to inter­act in a rel­e­vant way with con­sumers in-store.

Brands will explore new and inter­est­ing ways to load mobile wal­lets with loy­al­ty cards, offers and oth­er objects that dri­ve acti­va­tion and engage­ment.

Social adver­tis­ing will con­tin­ue to focus on mobile as a way to serve native expe­ri­ence ads that will dri­ve the con­sumer clos­er to the point of sale on mobile via ecom­merce ads on Face­book, Pin­ter­est, etc.

Exper­i­men­ta­tion with vir­tu­al real­i­ty will catch adver­tis­ers’ imag­i­na­tions in terms of devel­op­ing expe­ri­ences that lever­age mobile devices and items like Google Card­board, VR apps, etc.  Apple just bought a VR com­pa­ny in the last month.  Expect more from them fur­ther out.

Google will index app con­tent and allow users to tri­al apps before down­load­ing them. In essence, Google looks to move beyond the app store and once again index infor­ma­tion, this time mobile expe­ri­ences.

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Mike Puffer, Senior Director of Mobile Solutions and Strategy, HelloWorld

The inter­sec­tion and inte­gra­tion of mobile expe­ri­ences, pro­mo­tions and loy­al­ty will con­tin­ue to take hold as the focal point for many brand strate­gies. The invest­ment in seam­less mobile-first expe­ri­ences that reward cus­tomers for their engage­ment, repeat pur­chas­es and advo­ca­cy will cap­ture a larg­er and larg­er slice of 2016 mar­ket­ing bud­gets.

Brands like Wal­mart, Star­bucks, Taco Bell, Delta and Macy’s have built long-term loy­al­ty app strate­gies and are bet­ting big know­ing that the util­i­ty of mobile, the engage­ment of pro­mo­tions, and the rela­tion­ships cre­at­ed through loy­al­ty pro­grams can unlock the sig­nif­i­cant incre­men­tal rev­enue and enhanced guest expe­ri­ences brands are reach­ing for.

These mobile loy­al­ty strate­gies will take prece­dence as the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem for the gen­er­a­tion and uni­fi­ca­tion of con­sumer data and will offer brands the abil­i­ty to cre­ate jour­ney-dri­ven com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gies and cross-chan­nel con­sumer engage­ment.

Brands will ramp up their org/team restruc­tur­ing ini­tia­tives to bet­ter weave mobile into the core of their busi­ness­es as opposed to rely­ing on small mobile-focused experts act­ing in siloed depart­ments.

IoT will con­tin­ue to weave its way into mar­ket­ing strate­gies made up of an advanc­ing ecosys­tem of inter-con­nect­ed mobile tech­nolo­gies like bea­cons, mobile wal­lets and apps. Brands will get aggres­sive in their inno­va­tion with­in this ecosys­tem to sup­port more seam­less loca­tion and con­tex­tu­al­ly aware expe­ri­ences that will enable more con­ve­nience and util­i­ty for con­sumers. Think about the abil­i­ty to place an order on your mobile phone, pay for it, dri­ve to the loca­tion, have the store real­ize you have arrived and alert a store asso­ciate to deliv­er your order to your vehi­cle.

Brands will look to devel­op more mobile-first employ­ee rewards pro­grams that will deliv­er bite-size train­ing con­tent, boost employ­ee engage­ment and reward employ­ees for their suc­cess­ful behav­iors with dig­i­tal incen­tives.

Not for a lack of impor­tance, but rather due to many indus­try legal changes and tech­nol­o­gy advances, SMS mes­sag­ing strate­gies will be refo­cused on util­i­ty, trans­ac­tion­al and loy­al­ty com­mu­ni­ca­tions, while push noti­fi­ca­tions will take a stronger hold in the pro­mo­tion­al mobile mes­sag­ing chan­nel.

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Nancy Harhut, CCO, Wilde Agency

Mar­keters will get bet­ter at under­stand­ing how peo­ple real­ly use their cell phones and will adapt their mobile mar­ket­ing strate­gies accord­ing­ly, ver­sus try­ing to foist cer­tain mobile behav­iors onto peo­ple.

Mar­keters will begin to take greater advan­tage of all the infor­ma­tion a cell phone can pro­vide (like the phone’s gyro­scope, its GPS and its abil­i­ty to know how fast you’re mov­ing, your heart rate and the music you’ve down­loaded) to cre­ate more per­son­al­ized mes­sages and expe­ri­ences.

Mar­keters will tap into vir­tu­al real­i­ty more often, as head­sets and video pro­duc­tion become more afford­able.

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Peter Corbett, President, Click 3X

While we have long prac­ticed a mobile-first phi­los­o­phy, we have been par­tic­u­lar­ly pas­sion­ate about the use of video in the mobile con­text. The pop­u­lar­i­ty of mobile video con­tin­ues to increase and will account for a stag­ger­ing 72 per­cent of total mobile data traf­fic by the end of 2019. User-gen­er­at­ed con­tent is also impor­tant, but even this ulti­mate­ly dri­ves to a lin­ear video piece. Some com­pa­nies like Snapchat are begin­ning to real­ly exper­i­ment with alter­nate, more engage­able for­mats and tech­nolo­gies.

We are par­tic­u­lar­ly focused on two areas, which we’ve called Beyond The Play But­ton. One is 360-degree mobile video, which is either stereo­scop­ic or via YouTube (and soon Face­book). The oth­er is being able to embed links with­in mobile video and even to cus­tomize each video on a per user basis. In our view, we need to real­ly engage a view­er not only with mag­net­ic con­tent on mobile, but mag­net­ic tech­nol­o­gy sur­round­ing the con­tent.

Anoth­er mobile trend is shop­pable video. The con­cept has been around for a while, but it is now eas­i­er to do on a mobile plat­form thanks to the updates of Android and iOS oper­at­ing sys­tems. And as YouTube soon makes all of its videos shop­pable, the con­sumer will come to expect a buy­ing capa­bil­i­ty in all brand videos. Even large retail chains are get­ting in on the trend. We recent­ly worked with Kmart to devel­op shop­pable videos that have con­sumers engag­ing in real-time.

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Gary J. Nix, CSO, bdot

Deep Link­ing

While this tech­nique has been used by oth­er apps, when plat­forms such as Snapchat enable deep link­ing for pub­lish­ers, this illus­trates an oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to enhance con­sumers’ expe­ri­ences. Savvy brands who have cre­at­ed or cul­ti­vat­ed com­mu­ni­ties on these types of net­works must use this to the advan­tage of the com­mu­ni­ty to eas­i­ly pro­vide the con­tent that is desired, which is, among many things, a mar­ket­ing win.

Vir­tu­al and Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty

VR and AR are already being tout­ed as the dar­lings of 2016 and mobile devices can be the mech­a­nism that pro­vides high­er user adop­tion rates as opposed to the expen­sive, bulky meth­ods of deliv­ery that VR has been known for. With all of this hul­la­baloo regard­ing VR and AR, cou­pled with suc­cess­ful cam­paigns such as IHOP’s Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty Games and mobile VR prod­ucts such as Google Card­board and Sam­sung Gear VR, it would behoove brands to invest some time and ener­gy join­ing con­sumers in the vir­tu­al and aug­ment­ed world. The brands that aren’t par­a­lyzed by fear and cre­ate qual­i­ty con­tent will win big.

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Lauren Moores, Vice President of Strategy, Dstillery

Bea­cons

Prox­im­i­ty sig­nals from bea­cons and sen­sors will replace our cur­rent fas­ci­na­tion with loca­tion sig­nals derived from our mobile devices and GPS. Indoors, bea­cons can be more accu­rate than GPS, but devices and SDKs are still need­ed to pick up the broad­cast sig­nal com­ing from the bea­con. This doesn’t mean that our reliance on GPS loca­tion sig­nals for mobile mar­ket­ing sud­den­ly diverts to sen­sor data yet. Advances in bea­con tech­nol­o­gy and a growth in mar­keter aware­ness will make it a solu­tion that ear­ly adopters or new mar­keters incor­po­rate in their 2016 plans.

Mobile Prospect­ing

The abil­i­ty to grow a brand’s audi­ence comes from con­vert­ing prospects rather than retar­get­ing exist­ing cus­tomers. Mobile audi­ence mod­els will get more sophis­ti­cat­ed where we com­bine behav­ioral and geolo­ca­tion sig­nals to find new audi­ences on mobile devices. Cur­rent­ly, find­ing new audi­ences on mobile is lim­it­ed to a “birds of a feath­er flock together”-approach. New mod­els will extend the cur­rent behav­ioral machine learn­ing approach to mobile, find­ing new brand audi­ences based on the web, app and place behav­iors of exist­ing audi­ences.

Emo­tion

The growth in wear­ables has played a huge role in chang­ing the way we man­age our health in 2015. This growth in “self data,” which includes phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al sig­nals, is just start­ing to be used for brand mes­sag­ing and tar­get­ing, extend­ing the abil­i­ty of neu­ro­science mar­ket research to move beyond pan­els and stud­ies to quan­ti­ta­tive data. Mar­keters will need to keep in mind that we buy wear­ables because we want to know our­selves and not because we want adver­tis­ing. We want rec­om­men­da­tions for us — reminders for what we need to do, what we may have for­got­ten or a nudge to ensure we are stay­ing healthy.

Cre­ative

With the rise of ad-block­ing, the expect­ed demise of the ban­ner and the growth in video, cre­ative will be a big theme for 2016. Some say pro­gram­mat­ic broke adver­tis­ing, but pro­gram­mat­ic data will allow for the use of cur­rent insights to inform cre­ative exe­cu­tion. The use of data sci­ence to mea­sure and opti­mize cre­ative per­for­mance will grow with cur­rent cre­ative agen­cies look­ing to add data sci­en­tists to their ros­ter either through in-house or part­ner­ships.

Cross-Device

It’s not real­ly about mobile as a silo any­more. It is real­ly about using the dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal data to reach your audi­ence wher­ev­er they are. Stud­ies in 2015 have already shown that mobile should be not used alone and instead, when part of the over­all media mix, enhances oth­er dig­i­tal and lin­ear chan­nels. The dis­tinc­tion of dig­i­tal chan­nels will merge by the end of 2016.

Mobile Attri­bu­tion

I would love to say that CTR declines as a trend in mobile mar­ket­ing as mobile attri­bu­tion catch­es up to mobile ad deliv­ery. There are some solu­tion providers who are mak­ing head­way in this area, but a lot of tech­nol­o­gy work still needs to be done.

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Tom La Vecchia, President, X Factor Media

The newest trend in mobile is the forced touch func­tion­al­i­ty, which will serve up pages based off of a soft or hard push. This will cre­ate a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence for iPhone users and will give Apple yet anoth­er advan­tage.

Wear­ables will also increase in mar­ket share, specif­i­cal­ly the watch cat­e­go­ry as active peo­ple will use it for small data as well as their tra­di­tion­al mobile phone. The Apple Watch is start­ing to take off and is show­ing no signs of slow­ing down in 2016.

Vir­tu­al real­i­ty will be more promi­nent, which will be used for both busi­ness and gam­ing. It will be used by the real estate mar­ket, trav­el indus­try and any area that ben­e­fits from expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing.

Last­ly, 3D tech­nol­o­gy will final­ly get its due since the tim­ing is right and tech­nol­o­gy bet­ter sup­ports 3D mobile uti­liza­tion. It will be some­what lim­it­ed at first, but 3D will be ful­ly rolled out in three years as 2D will be a thing of the past.

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Bob Bentz, president, Purplegator

Siri and OK Google use voice recog­ni­tion to ini­ti­ate a search. Expect Google’s next move to include improved voice recog­ni­tion in smart cars where dri­vers can’t type.

The pro­lif­er­a­tion of apps pos­es a seri­ous chal­lenge to Google and all of the search engines. That is because search engines can­not eas­i­ly index the con­tent that is inside of apps. Expect Google to no longer just pro­vide search on the Inter­net, but also pro­vide search inside of the mil­lions of apps that are avail­able.

Mobile brings a pow­er­ful array of laser tar­get­ing fea­tures that were not avail­able at any time in the past. But, to date, adver­tis­ers have not been able to take full advan­tage of them. That is all going to change as mar­keters con­tin­ue to become more sophis­ti­cat­ed in their abil­i­ty to manip­u­late big data and tar­get spe­cif­ic users with even more advanced loca­tion-based ser­vices.

Peo­ple are inher­ent­ly lazy and they aren’t going to read if they can be enter­tained with a video. More and more brands will expand their video capa­bil­i­ties to offer more engag­ing adver­tis­ing that goes far beyond the tra­di­tion­al ban­ner ad. This will be dri­ven in part by faster 5G ser­vices that will enable videos to load faster and eas­i­er.

TV pro­grams are going to find bet­ter ways to inte­grate mul­ti­screen­ing than just vot­ing on Amer­i­can Idol. View­ers are going to be able to choose the out­comes of episodes or vote on who should hook up on The Bach­e­lor. But it will be TV adver­tis­ers that lead the way with the most inno­v­a­tive mul­ti­screen­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. View­er­ship of TV ads is way down and the indus­try is too inno­v­a­tive to con­tin­ue to let that wane.

Mobile and tele­vi­sion are going to become clos­er bed­fel­lows through joint ven­tures and pos­si­bly even merg­ers or acqui­si­tions. Along with big data providers, the merg­ers will enable an adver­tis­ing pow­er­house by send­ing adver­tise­ments to smart­phones and tablets simul­ta­ne­ous with the view­ing of tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials.

The idea of using a mobile phone to pay just makes sense. It is far safer than cred­it cards and the user doesn’t have to wor­ry about los­ing them or his or her account get­ting hacked. More busi­ness­es will enter the mobile wal­let bat­tle.

Expect retail­ers to offer their own direct mobile pay­ment solu­tions to engage with their most loy­al users. Those pay­ment mech­a­nisms won’t only be in the mobile phone; they’ll also be embed­ded on key fobs and loy­al­ty cards. The ulti­mate win­ner is not going to be Apple Pay or Android Pay. It’s going to be the bank’s mobile wal­let offer­ing because it will be seam­less­ly inte­grat­ed into a customer’s exist­ing mobile bank­ing efforts.

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Tim Lavelle, director of SEO and social media, U.S. Interactive Media

Mobile assis­tants like Siri, Google Now and Cor­tana will con­tin­ue to gain more mar­ket share as more and more users switch to phones that include those tech­nolo­gies, as well as exist­ing users begin­ning to rely on them more. The key to lever­ag­ing these new tech­nolo­gies from a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive is to make sure the tech­nolo­gies that pow­er these assis­tant ser­vices can under­stand and inter­pret your app and web­site data so that they can effec­tive­ly serve it to the end user.

To do this, sites will need to lever­age pro­to­cols like schema and micro­da­ta, high­light­ing their web­pages’ vital infor­ma­tion with the prop­er tags. Busi­ness­es with mobile apps will need to inte­grate app index­ing into their strate­gies so that apps can access data that is both with­in the app and out­side of it and vice ver­sa. The bot­tom line is: make your web­site and app as acces­si­ble as pos­si­ble to the ser­vices that your users are using.

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Search

Matt McGowan, Head of Strategy, Google

Mobile has for­ev­er changed the way we live. It’s frac­tured the con­sumer jour­ney into hun­dreds of real-time, intent-dri­ven micro-moments, each one of which is a crit­i­cal oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to shape our pur­chase deci­sions and per­son­al pref­er­ences. How does this man­i­fest?

• 82 per­cent of smart­phone users turn to their phone to influ­ence a pur­chase deci­sion while in a store, imme­di­ate­ly before the point of sale.
• 62 per­cent of smart­phone users are more like­ly to take action right away toward solv­ing an unex­pect­ed prob­lem or new task because they have a smart­phone.
• 90 per­cent of smart­phone users have used their phone to make progress toward a long-term goal or mul­ti-step process while “out and about.”*

What can adver­tis­ers do about it? I believe there will be increased focus on reten­tion-based mar­ket­ing (the intro­duc­tion of Face­book’s Cus­tom Audi­ences and Google’s Cus­tomer Match sup­port this). Mar­keters will con­tin­ue to focus on sup­port­ing the cus­tomer in the moment that they need help ver­sus spend­ing on large brand­ing or aware­ness cam­paigns that lack the imme­di­a­cy focus. Mobile will be the plat­form where this takes place.

*Con­sumers in the Micro-Moment, Google/Ipsos, US, March 2015

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Simon Heseltine, Senior Director of Organic Audience Development, AOL

AOL CEO Tim Arm­strong recent­ly revealed that almost two-thirds of our traf­fic is from mobile. Mobile traf­fic to our Kore­an edi­tion of the Huff­in­g­ton Post is at 90 per­cent and it’s 72 per­cent at Huff­in­g­ton Post Japan. So clear­ly mobile is here to stay and any­one who hasn’t already imple­ment­ed a mobile solu­tion for their web­site has to be extreme­ly ner­vous when they show their ever-declin­ing traf­fic num­bers to man­age­ment.

What’s going to change in 2016?

Well, as more brands con­tin­ue to chase after the gold­en uni­corn that is Mil­len­ni­als, increas­ing the lev­el of com­pe­ti­tion for this finite resource, it’s going to become more and more chal­leng­ing for mar­keters to gain a foothold and retain their share of this alleged­ly fick­le demo­graph­ic.

We already saw Google con­cen­trat­ing more on mobile in 2015 with the Mobi­leged­don update, and giv­en the traf­fic com­ing from mobile, there’s no rea­son to think that focus on mobile qual­i­ty and speed won’t con­tin­ue, so there’ll be fur­ther mobile-spe­cif­ic updates/adjustments that fur­ther refine those require­ments.

Google’s already pushed out their Web Light solu­tion for mobile users that don’t have the band­width to han­dle the full pages. While it’s cur­rent­ly only in emerg­ing mar­kets, it’s not a huge jump to see Google, at some stage, pos­si­bly imple­ment­ing parts of this to “speed up” slow mobile sites – in oth­er words, those that aren’t opti­mized – rather than just penal­iz­ing them.

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Mobile Firms

Patrick Haig, product manager of App Store Analytics, Tune

Mar­keters often talk about mobile ver­sus desk­top or apps ver­sus the web. 2015 showed us that these chasms are grad­u­al­ly clos­ing. We saw the release of Google App Index­ing for iOS, bring­ing iOS apps into Google search results. Apple released Uni­ver­sal Links, bring­ing users from the web into the app expe­ri­ence with­out requir­ing an SDK. We also saw Apple release new Search APIs to help devel­op­ers bring users from on-device search back into installed apps.

In 2015, plat­form own­ers also sought to make app store dis­cov­ery, well, suck a lit­tle less. Google released an A/B test­ing tool to help devel­op­ers bet­ter under­stand that mes­sag­ing, cre­ative and con­tent leads to more installs and Apple released some algo­rithm updates lead­ing to more rel­e­vant search results.

2016 will be the year that mar­keters real­ly wrap their heads around these devel­op­ments in a mean­ing­ful (and mea­sur­able!) way. Brands will use these tech­nolo­gies in earnest to bring users into the app, where con­text lives, like loca­tion, pay­ment capa­bil­i­ties, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, etc., which leads to engag­ing expe­ri­ences.

Bridg­ing the web-to-app divide hasn’t been straight­for­ward though, and while the val­ue is appar­ent, the mea­sur­able ben­e­fit has been tough to dis­cern. Google offers some insights into what queries lead to an app’s con­tent, but this data is only avail­able for Android apps. With Uni­ver­sal Links, mea­sure­ment becomes even more dif­fi­cult (i.e., Apple doesn’t pro­vide any).

Ana­lyt­ics com­pa­nies are work­ing hard to solve this and for good rea­son: Mar­keters need data to real­ly under­stand the impor­tance of new tech­nolo­gies. Mar­keters aren’t wait­ing, but mea­sure­ment will enable them to pri­or­i­tize con­tent based on per­for­mance and opti­mize con­tent for max­i­mum engage­ment.

App store dis­cov­ery will also con­tin­ue to be a hot top­ic in 2016 with new­er strate­gies like app store A/B test­ing becom­ing more wide­spread. Since Google’s A/B test­ing tool came out, a lot of mar­keters have tak­en advan­tage. Mar­keters are test­ing how videos, screen­shot con­tent and oth­er ele­ments impact install rates and even the behav­ior of users that even­tu­al­ly install.

Although Apple hasn’t released its own A/B test­ing tool, mar­keters will lever­age third-par­ty prod­ucts with the same intent: how to get more hard-won traf­fic to install. While ever­green strate­gies around app store opti­miza­tion, like key­word opti­miza­tion, will con­tin­ue to be cen­tral to mobile mar­ket­ing, mea­sure­ment will dri­ve more adop­tion of these nascent tech­nolo­gies by sophis­ti­cat­ed mar­keters.

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Momchil Kyurkchiev, CEO, Leanplum

In 2016, the mobile indus­try will see a greater empha­sis on per­son­al­iz­ing push noti­fi­ca­tions.

Right now, too many brands use a one-size-fits-all approach to push, or send the same mes­sage to their full cus­tomer base, often only dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing by name. These brands are miss­ing out on oppor­tu­ni­ties to build one-on-one rela­tion­ships with cus­tomers.

In 2016, I think more brands will see the val­ue of per­son­al­iza­tion and con­nect with behav­ior-dri­ven mes­sages, dri­ving engage­ment and con­ver­sions.

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Djamel Agaoua, SVP, Cheetah Mobile

As more users engage with mobile, brands, adver­tis­ers and devel­op­ers will gath­er and learn from an extra­or­di­nary amount of sig­nals data. Under­stand that I am not ref­er­enc­ing sim­ple demo­graph­ic data, but actu­al behav­ioral data found in those sig­nals: How you use an app, when and to what out­comes.

This behav­ior-based data is the omnipresent nat­ur­al resource that the promise of mobile com­merce is based on. When adver­tis­ers, mar­keters and devel­op­ers have the reli­able tools and process­es to ver­i­fy that data and the abil­i­ty to turn that raw fuel into the stuff that will pow­er ana­lyt­ics tech­nolo­gies and feed native ad for­mats tai­lored to the user’s cir­cum­stances, mobile will have reached its tip­ping point. The flood­gates will open and we’ll stop think­ing of mobile in terms of its poten­tial and instead under­stand it for the game-chang­ing com­mer­cial force that it is.

For the last quar­ter of 2015, there’s been a lot of chat­ter about ad block­ing, with many pun­dits bemoan­ing the poten­tial­ly crip­pling effects of ad-block­ing techs on the growth of m‑commerce. Those con­ver­sa­tions are miss­ing the point.

Ad block­ing isn’t the end of mobile com­merce, it’s the cat­a­lyst that will bring us to the next lev­el. Seen in its true light, ad block­ing is a sign mobile is matur­ing and a clear indi­ca­tion as to the future of next-lev­el native adver­tis­ing for­mats.

The rea­sons that con­sumers are adopt­ing ad-block­ing tech­nolo­gies are sim­ple: mobile ads are intru­sive, off-tar­get and pro­vide no util­i­tar­i­an val­ue. The future of mobile ads – next-lev­el native – will change that by lever­ag­ing the cre­ativ­i­ty of brands, devel­op­ers and pub­lish­ers with the vision to cre­ate inno­v­a­tive new ad for­mats that pro­vide val­ue-add by mix­ing the ad expe­ri­ence with the things we use our mobiles for every day.

This per­fect union of engage­ment, util­i­ty and com­mer­cial oppor­tu­ni­ty will be found exact­ly where we spend most of our mobile time: in apps. Net-net, this evolv­ing, supe­ri­or engage­ment between brands and users will organ­i­cal­ly lend itself towards bet­ter, more tar­get­ed ads, low­er cost per acqui­si­tion and high­er life­time val­ues of users.

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Adam Meshekow, EVP of Strategy and National Sales, SITO Mobile

CRM data will be uti­lized much more through brands for closed-loop attri­bu­tion. So you use your own cus­tomer data for tar­get­ing to cre­ate loy­al­ty. That same data will be used to then find the effec­tive­ness of ads and attri­bu­tion. You’ll also see an uptick in the return of lapse cus­tomers — peo­ple they haven’t seen in the store in a cer­tain num­ber of times — because now you can use their data to tar­get them with spe­cif­ic, cus­tomized ads to bring them back.

Mobile video is going to be huge. We’ll see adver­tis­ers using mobile video pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly out­side of tra­di­tion­al DMA and demo­graph­ic tar­get­ing. We’ll see more rich data seg­ments used in a mobile video capac­i­ty and for­mats are start­ing to change as well to be more dynam­ic.

We’re also mov­ing to mobile 2.0 with mobile pro­gram­mat­ic. This is using mobile data and pro­gram­mat­ic to tar­get mobile users more effec­tive­ly. We’ll see adver­tis­ers using data to pow­er cre­ative mes­sag­ing to tar­get across mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent aspects of the busi­ness. This would include sequen­tial mes­sag­ing and dynam­ic cre­ative based on weath­er, loca­tion, behav­ior and even pur­chase data.

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Brian Stumbaugh, Digital Marketing Manager, Barefoot Solutions

The next big trend in mobile mar­ket­ing is going to be extreme­ly tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing based off of cus­tomer data.

This mar­ket­ing automa­tion uses algo­rithms to find the ide­al times to reach out to cus­tomers with in-app mes­sages, push noti­fi­ca­tions, social media mar­ket­ing, etc.

This is already gain­ing trac­tion and will be essen­tial to mar­ket­ing strate­gies in 2016.

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Miné Salkin, Senior Digital Strategist, Absolute Mobile Solutions

The first mobile mar­ket­ing trend that will inevitably be explored more active­ly by mar­keters will be incor­po­rat­ing live stream­ing video tech­nolo­gies through mobile apps and social media plat­forms.

While live video stream­ing isn’t exact­ly a new­ly dis­cov­ered tool, there are a hand­ful of com­pa­nies who have already deliv­ered stun­ning results. One case study that comes to mind is Jim­my Fal­lon’s use of Periscope to entice his fans by show­ing spe­cial, one-off behind-the-scenes clips of his life.

2016 will be a par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ing time for 360 video pro­duc­ers who will be able to effec­tive­ly take their audi­ences cap­tive and show them a whole new dimen­sion of sto­ry­telling. Users will be able to walk through brand acti­va­tion-like expe­ri­ences with­out even tak­ing a sin­gle step away from their phone screens.

With vir­tu­al real­i­ty devices like Google Card­board and oth­er con­sumer-lev­el entry head­sets, 360-degree video and vir­tu­al real­i­ty are going to become main play­ers on the mobile mar­ket­ing front. While qual­i­ty and cost are still a bar­ri­er to entry for pub­lish­ers, there’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for ear­ly adopters to get into this realm and cre­ate stun­ning, immer­sive expe­ri­ences for their cus­tomers.

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Ken Harlan, CEO, MobileFuse

Every year, there are a few key areas that always seem to improve in mobile mar­ket­ing: cre­ative, tar­get­ing and attri­bu­tion.

On the cre­ative side, it’s all about find­ing ways to dri­ve engage­ment and in many cas­es brands are find­ing ways to use the native func­tion­al­i­ty of a mobile device to cre­ate some new type of expe­ri­ence, whether that’s using voice, the accelerom­e­ter, or, going for­ward, it could even be vir­tu­al real­i­ty.

With tar­get­ing, the major emerg­ing trend is the impor­tance of tar­get­ing recep­tive moments. Adver­tis­ers are going away from tar­get­ing stan­dard demos, or using basic geo-fenc­ing, and are instead try­ing to under­stand what mind­set peo­ple are in when they are view­ing an ad and what con­tex­tu­al infor­ma­tion they can use to make an ad more rel­e­vant. This was a huge theme in 2015 and will con­tin­ue to be impor­tant in 2016.

For attri­bu­tion, it’s all about mov­ing beyond the click. How can we mea­sure brand lift? How are mobile and dig­i­tal ads impact­ing foot traf­fic or in-store pur­chas­es? Also, as the focus of tar­get­ing shifts towards these recep­tive moments, we’re see­ing this reflect­ed in attri­bu­tion, too, and adver­tis­ers are going to be real­ly focus­ing on not just how an ad per­formed, but why it may have per­formed the way it did.

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Ariel Shimoni, Director of Publisher Relations, StartApp

2015 saw the begin­ning of mobile video ads tak­ing over as one of the most pop­u­lar mar­ket­ing tools avail­able for adver­tis­ers. It became the gate­way for many big name brands to start spend­ing more on mobile (video is a natural/known medi­um for them, mak­ing it eas­i­er to buy on mobile) and apps and gam­ing mar­keters took advan­tage of video to eas­i­ly dis­trib­ute their titles through the insane­ly pop­u­lar reward­ed video ad unit in some of the most pop­u­lar games last year (Crossy Road is a good exam­ple).

Video will cer­tain­ly keep that momen­tum as more and more brands fol­low the trend and start mobile video cam­paigns.

Pro­gram­mat­ic buy­ing in mobile, I pre­dict, will also con­tin­ue to dom­i­nate the scene in 2016 as more and more buy­ers are look­ing for automa­tion and at the same time real-time bid­ding tech­nol­o­gy makes its way into top tier pub­lish­ers in mobile. It makes sense and is a nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion for mobile to offer smarter and more cost-effec­tive buy­ing meth­ods sim­i­lar to the web.

Last I’d men­tion social, where we see already huge vol­umes and spend and I am con­fi­dent this will just keep on grow­ing as there is so much more on social mobile apps that have yet to be tapped into. There is a lot more that mar­keters can learn about users and there will be new ways to reach and inter­act with them in a far more per­son­al and direct way.

As for new trends, 2016 will be the break­out year for vir­tu­al real­i­ty (as a nerd, I’ll add, “Final­ly!”). Mobile vir­tu­al real­i­ty (which is a VR head­set uti­liz­ing a mobile device to run the vir­tu­al real­i­ty expe­ri­ence) is the first to make it into mar­ket – Google Card­board and Sam­sung Gear VR are already released and hun­dreds of mobile VR games and apps are already avail­able for down­load on Android and iOS. While 2016 won’t see this as a mass mar­ket trend just yet, we will hear and see a lot of buzz around stun­ning cam­paigns by huge brands, offer­ing tru­ly new expe­ri­ences to users.

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Santiago Jaramillo, CEO, Bluebridge

There’s no ques­tion that mar­keters will gain more insights and real-time mobile data about their cus­tomers in 2016 than ever before. We know this because micro-moments enabled by mobile are reshap­ing con­sumer rela­tion­ships more and more, redefin­ing how brands inter­act with and learn about con­sumers.

Mobile is enabling these micro-moments by giv­ing con­sumers the access to infor­ma­tion that they crave when­ev­er and wher­ev­er they want it. Con­sumers have caught on to the pat­terns of web brows­ing, leav­ing them with an under­ly­ing sense that they’re being tracked and can’t con­trol how the infor­ma­tion will be used. But mobile apps have cre­at­ed a trust and inti­ma­cy between brand and con­sumer that makes demo­graph­ic and psy­cho­graph­ic infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing feel unob­tru­sive when request­ed through mobile. When done right, it doesn’t feel like a bur­den — but more like excel­lent cus­tomer sup­port.

Through the inti­ma­cy and per­son­al­ized feel of mobile mes­sages, con­sumers feel more com­fort­able allow­ing brands to be a part of their every­day lives by con­tact­ing them via push on their most pre­ferred devices. In fact, push noti­fi­ca­tions are now becom­ing the UI them­selves. We’ve start­ed to see this more and more through small but sig­nif­i­cant changes to our favorite apps and pro­grams. Facebook’s new app, Noti­fy, which is entire­ly push-based, allows users to get quick, up-to-the-minute noti­fi­ca­tions from the third par­ty sources they trust and want to hear from most.

When vis­it­ing web­sites, even if you’re logged in all the time, you’re still a vis­i­tor. With apps/notifications, you own the app. Infor­ma­tion from the brands you pre­fer are com­ing direct­ly to you. This real­i­ty opens the con­sumer up to the unprece­dent­ed expe­ri­ence of hav­ing a much more fre­quent and repet­i­tive rela­tion­ship with that prod­uct or ser­vice. In 2016, we will again expe­ri­ence a shift in con­sumer com­mu­ni­ca­tion and engage­ment that puts mobile at the fore­front of mar­ket­ing strate­gies through the pow­er of micro-moments.

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Other

Eli Goodman, Media Evangelist, comScore

2016 will be the year of mobile ad mea­sure­ment. In 2014, con­sumers shift­ed their media usage to mobile in a big way. In 2015, the dol­lars began to fol­low.

In 2016, adver­tis­ers are going to look for more proof that those dol­lars are being spent wise­ly and that means mea­sur­ing that mobile ads are view­able, free of fraud and reach­ing the right audi­ences. This intro­duces cross-media com­pa­ra­bil­i­ty to TV and online and gives mar­keters the abil­i­ty to ensure that their adver­tis­ing invest­ments align with their mar­ket­ing objec­tives.

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Ray Pun, Head of Strategic Marketing for Mobile Solutions, Adobe

Loca­tion is a big trend. Even with this hol­i­day sea­son, we saw major retail­ers exper­i­ment­ing with this, try­ing to encour­age shop­pers to use their mobile devices more when in-store. For instance, shop­pers could pho­to­graph their friend’s shoes and the app would pull up sug­ges­tions based off of that.

This is sig­nif­i­cant because mobile is the link that ties the phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal worlds togeth­er; these devices move with the user, with con­tex­tu­al data that allows brands to deliv­er per­son­al­ized expe­ri­ences. Recent Adobe sur­vey data shows that less than 50 per­cent of con­sumers are sat­is­fied with the mobile retail expe­ri­ence, indi­cat­ing an oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to do more.

On mobile, engage­ment is real­ly becom­ing the new acqui­si­tion. In the rush to acquire new users, we are see­ing a trend where users are either aban­don­ing apps or only using them a few times. Adobe data shows that shop­ping apps are used an aver­age of 13.5 times before being aban­doned and apps gen­er­al­ly have a half life of about 5 to 6 months. In 2016, brands will need to place heavy empha­sis on not only acquir­ing users, but fig­ur­ing out ways to keep them engaged and retained.

It will require a bet­ter under­stand­ing of user behav­ior, lever­ag­ing that to iter­ate con­stant­ly on the mobile expe­ri­ence and make data-informed deci­sions when it comes to engage­ment tac­tics like push mes­sag­ing. Red­box for exam­ple, was able to pin­point the exact hour for a push mes­sage that result­ed in a 2X increase of phys­i­cal rentals. These efforts will also enable brands to dis­cov­er the hero fea­tures that will make their apps high val­ue for the user, like the board­ing pass in the trav­el indus­try.

Data dri­ven mar­keters will extend their knowl­edge of A/B and mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing from the web to mobile apps. We expect mobile prod­uct and mar­ket­ing teams to work togeth­er on strate­gies for improv­ing user engage­ment and con­ver­sion. Ulti­mate­ly, dri­ving more repeat usage from loy­al cus­tomers is the goal for every busi­ness with con­sumer-fac­ing apps.

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Nadia Shouraboura, CEO, Hointer

I pre­dict a rapid evo­lu­tion of phys­i­cal expe­ri­ences, like in-store shop­ping, pow­ered by mobile and IoT devices, which, in turn, will bring new and untapped oppor­tu­ni­ties for mobile loca­tion and action-based mar­ket­ing.

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Chris Lucas, VP of Marketing, Formstack

Ad block­ing apps have been avail­able for Google devices and now apps are being cre­at­ed for Apple’s oper­at­ing sys­tems – these apps are here to stay. But it seems that devel­op­ers are quick­ly real­iz­ing the apps need to be refined to coex­ist with ben­e­fi­cial ad copy while elim­i­nat­ing the spam­my coun­ter­parts.

I believe that over time, ad block­ers will evolve to crawl ads so they can dif­fer­en­ti­ate qual­i­ty ad copy from spam. This will give users the enhanced mobile expe­ri­ence they’re look­ing for, while still allow­ing mar­keters to reach their tar­get audi­ences through valu­able con­tent, once again stress­ing the impor­tance of high-cal­iber ad copy from mar­keters.

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Julie Ginches, CMO, Kahuna

The cost to acquire mobile users is already going up and with the grow­ing adop­tion of mobile ad-block­ing tech­nol­o­gy, it may rise even more in 2016. One of the biggest trends we expect to see in 2016 is brands mak­ing a big­ger push to con­vert users to chan­nels that the brand can con­trol, like push noti­fi­ca­tions, in-app mes­sag­ing and email.

The bar for cus­tomer expe­ri­ence will also rise in 2016. We all remem­ber when it was a nice-to-have for your bank to have an app, but now that’s a require­ment and peo­ple also expect that app to be able to deposit checks by tak­ing pic­tures, locate ATMs quick­ly and inte­grate with fin­ger­print read­ers for authen­ti­ca­tion.

That high lev­el of expec­ta­tion also applies to the mes­sages brands send users. If you’re send­ing the same mes­sage via email, push and in-app, it’s going to turn users off. The best brands in 2016 will have a holis­tic omnichan­nel expe­ri­ence that ensures every mes­sage adds val­ue and delights the user. It’s not an easy task, but it’s what your cus­tomers demand.

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Nico Dato, Head of Marketing, Podium

One of the major trends we’ll see in 2016 is increas­es in local search­es via mobile devices.

Accord­ing to Google, search­es for local busi­ness­es or ser­vices have already dou­bled in the last year and many of those search­es are com­ing from con­sumers who have imme­di­ate buy­er intent and are search­ing from a mobile device.

We’ll see online reviews also play a larg­er role in help­ing con­sumers deter­mine what busi­ness­es they should engage with. Boil down a cus­tomer’s jour­ney and you’ll see local search and reviews play­ing a larg­er role than ever before.

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Andrew Lovasz, SVP of Marketing Strategy, Search Optics

Click to call cam­paigns will be preva­lent 2016, giv­ing mobile users increased access and con­ve­nience. Mar­keters will be able to give users what they want quick­er and eas­i­er. This will also allow for more unique phone track­ing, with increased data on search queries by brand, cat­e­go­ry, prod­uct, etc.

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Jenny Beightol, Director of Words and Reputations, Belly

The use of bea­cons will def­i­nite­ly be on the rise in 2016. This tech­nol­o­gy is espe­cial­ly pow­er­ful because it can iden­ti­fy when cus­tomers are inside a store and tar­get them with spe­cial offers based on their brows­ing and pur­chase behav­ior.

Brands that use loy­al­ty pro­grams that include bea­cons will have an advan­tage because they won’t have to build the tech­nol­o­gy on their own. They can send push noti­fi­ca­tions through their loy­al­ty pro­grams direct­ly to their cus­tomers when they’re inside the store to alert them of sales and offers that are high­ly tar­get­ed to them.

We pre­dict that QR codes and card-linked loy­al­ty will become even more inte­grat­ed with in-store shop­ping behav­iors. Not only do loy­al­ty pro­grams incen­tivize cus­tomers to return more often, but by adding the dig­i­tal com­po­nent, busi­ness own­ers can learn who their cus­tomers are, as well as more about their pur­chas­ing behav­iors.

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Jason Rothman, General Manager of Mobile, SteelHouse

2016 will be about con­ver­sions on mobile. Con­sumers are spend­ing beyond pre­dic­tions. I would wager that Black Fri­day and Cyber Mon­day 2016 will show close to 50 per­cent of total dig­i­tal e‑comm spend will be on mobile. This puts huge impor­tance on in-app retar­get­ing, dynam­ic cre­ative and robust seg­men­ta­tion.

A lot of talk about con­nect­ing brick and mor­tar with mobile device expe­ri­ences will like­ly dri­ve to more solu­tions at POCs, which will con­nect loy­al­ty, pro­mo­tions and prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions.

And, as mobile dri­ves more con­sumer spend, X‑device will be less impor­tant. It will become more of a stan­dard check­box every­one needs to sup­port.

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Sean Shoffstall, VP of Innovation and Strategy, Teradata Marketing Applications

In 2016, we’re going to see a big push for mobile push noti­fi­ca­tions. Take a look at these sta­tis­tics: A recent report from Onestop Inter­net said that 25 per­cent of con­sumers said receiv­ing rel­e­vant push noti­fi­ca­tions on their smart­phones always makes them more like­ly to com­plete a pur­chase. That being said, oth­er stud­ies have men­tioned that only 20 per­cent of retail­ers are using this method. Why is this?

A lot of mar­keters aren’t see­ing push noti­fi­ca­tions as mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties – but that’s exact­ly what they are. Many retail­ers, for exam­ple, have mobile appli­ca­tions just to say they have one, but once they have an appli­ca­tion, it’s impor­tant to acknowl­edge that it’s anoth­er mar­ket­ing avenue. There’s email, SMS and in-store, but mobile push needs to be a key part of this strat­e­gy as well.

Any­one who has down­loaded an app has clear­ly shown inter­est in what the retail­er has to offer. These are the cream of the crop cus­tomers and retail­ers don’t have to wor­ry about some anony­mous per­son they’re mar­ket­ing to – this is some­one who has raised their hand and said, “I’m inter­est­ed in your prod­ucts.”

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Tal Schwartz, CEO, ClickTale

Eye con­trol via accu­rate eye track­ing will be launched in 2016 and become a major input method.

Costs are com­ing down, adding to its via­bil­i­ty as a new way we inter­act with devices, smart­phones, and watch­es.

With the addi­tion of voice con­trol, eye con­trol will be added to tac­tile input devices, touch and key­board.

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Jamar Cobb-Dennard, Sales and Marketing Consultant, JamarSpeaks.com

Online/Offline Inte­gra­tion

Con­sumers expect their mobile expe­ri­ences to fol­low and mim­ic their online and brick-and-mor­tar expe­ri­ences with brands. Nine­ty-one per­cent of cus­tomers are brows­ing a brand’s web­site while in store, while 75 per­cent of those cus­tomers who receive a mobile coupon while in-store would change their buy­ing behav­ior. Mobile mar­keters have to go beyond being sim­ply mobile-friend­ly and have to inte­grate their shop­ping expe­ri­ences across chan­nel.

Geolo­ca­tion Cus­tomer Aware­ness

In a sub­tle way, mar­keters need to devel­op a sys­tem using geolo­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy that iden­ti­fies cus­tomers who have already vis­it­ed a brand online when they are walk­ing by a store. How great would it be to receive a coupon for an item in an aban­doned cart when you’re sit­ting in the food court of the mall doing hol­i­day shop­ping? This type of mar­ket­ing will increase con­ver­sions.

Chan­nel Pref­er­ence Opti­miza­tion

Even though the num­ber of cus­tomers who pre­fer to receive their pri­ma­ry com­mu­ni­ca­tion from brands via mobile is less than email, there is still a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age who would pre­fer to com­mu­ni­cate through app push mes­sages and text. Don’t wor­ry about send­ing a sur­vey to gauge their pref­er­ence – sim­ply send your cam­paigns via mul­ti-chan­nels and see which cus­tomers are open­ing and/or respond­ing to each mes­sage by which chan­nel. This tells us con­sumers’ true pref­er­ences. Then we can send our wel­come series, cart aban­don­ment, browse aban­don­ment and post-pur­chase cam­paigns via the chan­nel that will elic­it the great­est impact.