Multi-Screen Marketing

As media consumption habits have become less linear and across a plethora of devices, it is important that advertisers focus on what really captures the attention of the audience rather than the features and functionality of the devices that are being utilised to reach the audience.

The authors of Multi-Screen Marketing (who are both Microsoft employees) have written an in-depth book that provides some useful advice on how to target the right people with the right content at the right moment.

There is a view within the book that most advertisers are launching campaigns on multiple screens but this doesn’t constitute what should be considered as multi-screen marketing. This is partly driven by marketers trying to adopt a single screen strategy across multiple screens and also existing structures within marketing organisations and their agencies.  Most multi-screen campaigns are still fragmented and don’t provide the cohesive user experience that consumers are looking for.  This is a fair point and certainly heightens the importance of ensuring that marketers really understand the role that each screen is playing in the consumer’s journey and the capabilities that they have internally to create seamless experiences for the consumer.

So far so good. 

I was feeling really enthused about the book and what was to come in the remaining chapters. Unfortunately the enthusiasm I had at the beginning did not last. It struck me as I made further progress with the book that there were so many references to Microsoft research studies, case studies and yes all things related to... Microsoft. This was rather off-putting to say the least and made me feel that I was reading a book that kept telling me how wonderful Microsoft is and not done in a subtle way either.

Amidst the sales pitch, there was an insightful chapter about ways to identify meaningful consumer metrics that align with marketer objectives. There was a particularly useful consumer device journey framework which helped to simplify and provide a good structure to a complex subject (as all good frameworks should do) but this wasn’t really sufficient to change my view of the book by this point.  It wasn’t as insightful as I wanted it to be and I would have liked to have seen a wider range of research and case studies utilised to provide further substance to the points that the authors raised.

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