We haven’t even made it to Halloween, yet a recent study carried out by Experian found 49 per cent of retailers plan to launch their festive campaigns before we have chance to say “trick or treat”. Just last Christmas, tablets were being snapped up every second. With sales increasing year-on-year (yoy) by over 1000 per cent, it’s no wonder retailers dubbed last year’s frenzy as the ‘Tablet Christmas’. But, can we expect more of the same this year? For as long as we can remember, all it seems we have been hearing is finally ‘the year of mobile’ is here. Has it passed us by without so much of a second glace or is it yet to come?
We’ve come a long way since the first patented Tablet design was in 1888 (yes, that’s right – you can Wiki it so it must be true!), with over 19 per cent of the USA’s population owning a tablet device. It’s no wonder that Apple’s share price increased by 30 per cent within the first six months of the first iPad that we know and love today launching, showing a demand for accessibility wherever we may be. As people’s lives become more demanding and fast-paced, there’s become an incessant requirement for them to be online on-the-go and have amenities that we traditionally got from a desktop, to hand. So, how are we looking now?
Crucially research has shown the majority of time people are using them to check email. Granted, this is based on the fact they are increasingly used by businesses in various formats. Secondary to this are game and social with 80 per cent of people’s time on tablets being spent in-app (skewed slightly by popular social networks such as Facebook etc). This comes as no surprise as the app landscape is diversifying at a primary rate to the device itself. With the rise of apps such as Tinder and SnapChat, there are becoming increasing opportunities for not only people to communicate with each other, but for advertisers to communicate with people. This should be a nod to marketing directors to consider where they choose to put their money – creation of app or an all singing and dancing mobile site.
Now advertisers have the reach and scalability on tablet devices, advertisers have opportunity to talk to an audience at scale to drive incremental reach and further engage with their consumers with new rich formats cross platform, giving brands the opportunity to have a ‘cross platform’ offering. This ultimately presents a further challenge for advertisers to have a cohesive brand voice across devices so not to misinform or confuse the consumer.
But where does this leave us this festive period and across the year to come? Following on from the above, from a marketer’s perspective, only 24 per cent of advertisers cited mobile devices as their key Christmas marketing channel, with mobile losing out over online display (59 per cent) and print (46 per cent). So, despite the accessibility to new-found reach and scale, are advertisers already discounting the device as a less credible channel, or is it that tablet will continue to be a secondary device to desktop for the foreseeable? Yoy sales devolved from experiencing increases as high as 143 per cent in 2010, to just 11 per cent in 2012. Is this an indication of consumption beginning to plateau?
MEC Opinion
Unless providers continue to be revolutionary in the way they have with smartphones, there will become less of a need for people to ‘up-grade’ simply to gain a better model as oppose to them actually gaining something beneficial from it. As people diversify and life changes, the way people use their tablet will ultimately continue to adapt, thus the need will ultimately grow as a result. Therefore, people might begin to find a need for a tablet as a gift, for a reason they weren’t privy to last year. This subsequently begs the question; is there a need for a further revolution, whilst people are still in discovery mode? I’m sure we’ll find out in the New Year.