LOSING MY PHONE, LOSING MY MIND

On Sunday night I lost it. I mean, I totally lost it. I set my phone on a bench seat on the back of my boat and walked inside. I was gone for two seconds. Then T-Pain drove by on his mega yacht and threw a three-foot wake through the whole marina. Bloop. The phone went down into the murky waters of the Intracoastal Waterway. I lost my iPhone and after 24 hours of losing my mind, I realized just how dependent I am on this stupid phone.   

You know the feeling, don’t you? You don’t feel so smart when you lose a smartphone.   

I take my phone everywhere. I use it constantly. I text, tweet, post, snap, Instagram, and Facetime. It’s my camera. It’s my navigation. It’s my spell checker and fact-checker. I use it for work. I use it for play (seriously, I am addicted to Bricks Breaker Quest). So you can only imagine how lost I felt when I lost it. Thanks to Asurion insurance, I had my new Verizon iPhone within 24 hours. Yes, it was only a day, but man oh man, did I realize how dependent I am on mobile technology. Imagine it, I had to drive six miles to the airport and I had to actually read the signs along the way and figure out very difficult things — like which direction is north and how to calculate a 20 percent tip on my bar tab by using math. #carrytheone  

So think about this from a marketing standpoint; as a consumer, a company can direct marketing messages to me through text, chat, social media, games, apps, and online content. As a consumer, I am looking at this device morning, noon, and night. A mobile user is a captive audience. When I lose the device, I almost lose it and I have to get another one right away. (I was literally waiting for the UPS man on the curb to show up at 1 o’clock. He was ten minutes late.) 
 
During the Golden Age of Radio, a family would tune in faithfully each night to hear the news, a game show, a western, or a comedy routine by Abbott and Costello. Whether it was sponsored by Texaco or Ovaltine, it was a captive audience. The Golden Age of Television took advertising to a whole new level — advertisers didn’t merely sponsor the program, they showed you beautifully produced 90-second ads like this beauty from Coca-Cola. With the advent of the internet, advertisers found an ever more captive audience, two feet away on a computer screen, delivering the message in 30 seconds or less. Today, advertisers have a thousand different ways to make you aware of their brand or marketing message twelve inches from your face in less than 15 seconds. Unlike a 40 pound Motorola radio, a 200 pound Sylvania Super Set, or a 25 pound Dell desktop, my smartphone is small enough to fit in my pocket…and small enough to slip through a one-inch gap in the deck seat.  

Your company might be advertising on radio, television, or the web, but are you marketing through mobile? Might want to think about that. Call me. I know a guy.