The mobile hub: Internet trend report charts seismic changes

Thud. The KPCB Internet Trends Report 2013 has arrived (see Slideshare embedded below). In just a short few years, it’s become something of a phenomenon. It’s hotly anticipated, and when it touches down, some folk go AWOL for a few days. Written by Mary Meeker, a renowned digital guru formerly with Morgan Stanley, along with, this year, her colleague Liang Wu, does not disappoint. Key trends both seismic and merely notable are once again put into stark relief, and somehow even after over 100 charts packed full of info, there’s never enough. 

Take an aggregate view of the data to hand, and a clear takeaway is the mainstreaming of mobile. It’s the combination of the sheer volume of digital content created, the explosion of sharing content, and its ubiquitous distribution through handheld devices that makes a clear case that mobile has become the unifying screen. Smartphones are reported to be owned by over 1.5 billion users globally, with huge momentum overall at 31 per cent year-on-year growth. 

The ongoing take-up in emerging markets, especially China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Philippines has been rapid in the last year, and in Australia which has historically one of the highest penetration of these devices anyway, a very sizable 27 per cent yoy lift is recorded. Internationally, the tablet base, although smaller, is now growing at 3X that of smartphones, and has achieved in three years a comparable volume of shipments it’s taken PC desktop/notebooks to reach in just under 20 years. 

But going back to this dramatic sharing upswing. In the report there’s an interesting ranking courtesy of Ipsos, with respondents in 24 markets indicating their ease with sharing ‘everything’ or ’most things’ online. The top five? Well, the Saudis are leaders at 60 per cent, followed by India at 53 per cent, Indonesia at 50 per cent, then South Korea and Turkey, both at about 40 per cent. Our experience, particularly in Indonesia, shows us this culture of swapping and sharing has real impact in the area of peer-to-peer marketing over mobile. Remember, ‘digital’ in Indonesia is mobile.

Across the remaining markets tested, in China 33 per cent are willing to share 'most things' or 'everything', Poland is propping up European credentials at 30 per cent and Brazil is right on the global average at 24 per cent. After that we get to Australia at 18 per cent, the US and Canada at 15 per cent, Great Britain at 11 per cent, and the last recorded is Japan at 4 per cent.  The message is clear: All that investment in marketing circles about mobility meeting branded content meeting viral’ness is well founded.

So, what else in the report? Well, what’s 'mobile' anyway? What about a pair of glasses, or a watch, or a car? A car is about as mobile as anything can get, is it not? The contention by KPCB is that the typical engineering and user-adoption lifecycle of new technology is roughly half of a decade. The conclusion to be drawn is straightforward: That ‘wearables’ will be commonplace before we know it. Google Glass in its first iteration may well end up being a brilliant catalyst of a whole new sector. If not a mass-market product itself, it’s nonetheless a sign of what mobile personal computing will become.

I think the gobsmacking slide below is an amazing commentary on what mobile has instigated before our very eyes. It shows the domination of the PC platform (Microsoft Windows + Intel chips, aka “Wintel”) in personal computing—until iPhone and Android arrive. It’s extraordinary to see.

KPCB Online Trends Report 2013/ Asymco.com (as of 2011), Public Filings, Morgan Stanley Research, Gartner for 2012 data.

I personally can’t help reflecting that a year seems a long time between these reports, which I think says a lot about how little documented, public, high-quality, well-resourced analysis and strategic thinking there is going around.

Talking of wearables

Huawei, China’s prolific mobile conglomerate, foreshadows wearables as being the key battleground for hardware companies. It spun the creds of its admittedly impressive Ascend P6 smartphone, which measures a mere 6.18 mm in depth, to comment that all manufacturers are placing huge R&D resources into the area of wearable tech. The implication of this for marketers is obvious—know your customer, know their context.

Mobile advertising eating into desktop ad share

eMarketer has shared some US data (US digital ad spending by channel 2012-2017), that predicts the desktop share of ad spend will peak in 2014, thereafter conceding ground to mobile devices.  The point is that it’s not a switch that’s flicked overnight. The reality is that desktop spend growth is slowing ahead of that change. eMarketer sees mobile ad spend increasing to hit US$27 billion in that market by 2017.

Lastly, Prism versus a Collide-a-scope

No self-centred marketer (yes, you can probably delete the words ‘self-centred’), can be ambivalent about the potential impact of the data privacy NSA revelations, and Edward Snowden. There are sensitivities around consumer data and how it’s used, and rightly so. Marketers need to assume governmental oversight of business and commerce will become more enthusiastic, with the marketing world, particularly the digital world, and especially the mobile world, at the centre of a maelstrom around data privacy.

I think a simple, maybe over-simplistic guideline around this sort of thing is, you either use data only to a level where there is zero, nada, personally identifiable information in use, or you seek full and transparent rights to use that level of data to the genuine benefit of the user.

Whatever your politics, the business impact is clear: taxpayers across the globe are having a sneak peek of their elected representatives' surveillance techniques, and as a consequence conservative-leaning legislators who would further limit adland's ability to give people commercial information that is of more relevance to them aren’t wasting the opportunity to capitalise. This, I am sure, is of absolutely no interest to Edward Snowden, but it is of great interest to us. With big data, let’s be bold in our assertions, whilst upfront about our intent.