Mobilized Marketing: How to Drive Sales, Engagement, and Loyalty Through Mobile Devices

Chapter 35

Advice from the Smartest Marketers

The best part about writing this book is the opportunity I have been given to talk to—and learn from—some of the brightest and innovative marketing minds working around the world. Each eagerly passed along their insights, hoping like I do that the readers of Mobilized Marketing, not to mention me, will become better equipped to gauge, use, and succeed with mobile.

Always generous, Hank Wasiak, a communications industry leader who has worked with the corporate elite of global business throughout his 40-year career, generously shared his views on how best to meet the consumer.

“Technology opened the door to what consumers always felt anyway—back in my day when we were doing IR [infrared] scores to gauge television commercials and saying how hard it was to break through, the average recall for a 30-second spot was maybe 25 percent of the people who were forced to look at a commercial would remember it,” he says. “They were telling us then, ‘I want it the way I want it when I want it.’ We just didn’t have the capability to do it. Now we do. Mobile, it gets you connected but it’s part of your life in a functional way, in an emotional way, an entertaining way, in a lifesaving way.”

And Wasiak, the former vice chairman of McCann Erickson WorldGroup, says fire sooner rather than later.

“To me, the key thing when looking at something is to be early and fast,” he says. “I’ve been the poster child for this. You want to overthink things sometimes. ...