Mobile is Quickly Becoming the First Screen
Over the past decade, I’ve watched and helped mobile entirely transform our lives as we know it.
Mobile devices went from making us reachable by voice at any time to making the information we want accessible at anytime, and as mobile networks and mobile advertising evolve alongside mobile devices, they’re quickly moving from our third choice to our first for news, entertainment, content creation and more.
There are a few reasons for this, but ultimately, the main reason for mobile’s shift from the third screen to the first stems-from mobile’s submissiveness towards our needs. Sir Jonathan Ive (as he is now known) made an excellent point about why this is, as depicted in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs autobiography,when describing the reason Jobs wanted a handle built into the original iMac. Ive said, “…with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them.” Our mobile devices are much more submissive to us than any of our ‘stationary’ devices’, and therefore, we enjoy using them (and do use them) much more. (If you feel like you’ve seen that Ive reference on this blog in the past, you have a fantastic memory! I used it again here to illustrate the same point because of how profoundly accurate it is).
This shift is further exemplified by the way victims of Hurricane Sandy were able to communicate during the aftermath of the hurricane, as well as they way those unaffected contributed to relief efforts.
In the past, relief efforts were advertised beginning with mass media, shifting to “traditional” digital media (or Tradigital media, as my buddy @ItsJonGluck likes to call it), and finally those efforts began to include mobile as a catalyst for quick payments in the Haiti relief efforts using PSMS (premium SMS text messages), where people were asked to text HAITI to a 90999 via traditional & digital media to contribute.
The main difference in Sandy’s relief efforts is the mobile channel was utilized as a destination location, and primary, standalone advertising efforts were directed at the mobile medium in the form of premium digital real estate at mobile destinations like in Apple’s App store.
Our mobile devices are already connected to all of our digital assets including our bank accounts, and they’ve, therefore become the easiest and most accessible way for us to perform almost any task as well as be entertained (as is evident by the simple and seamless donation process depicted below).
As time moves on, much of the world’s physical and virtual content will be built to optimize the mobile medium and our more traditional, formerly primary peripheral devices will just become extensions of our mobile experiences. This, coupled with our need for instant gratification will make our mobile devices even more valuable as they continue to dominate our interactions with the world.
