Welcome to the MBLT 2017 conference Summy Pack by Summurai.
The International Mobile Conference for Business - MBLT was held in April in Moscow.

The 6th International conference was devoted to mobile technologies and hosted leading speakers from Silicon Valley, Europe, Asia, and Russia, who discussed the trends and innovations in mobile industry and shared their success stories and practical cases for businesses.

Our team from Summurai created this "Summy Pack" with key lectures to make sure you don't miss anything. We summarized the lectures and narrated them into short summies, that will give you the main insights. 

We invite you to go ahead and get smarter.
The Summurai team.

In this session, Partridge shared insights that Shazam has been focusing on in the development of apps that users are willing to use time and time again.

The analysis of the “Shazaming” activity helps Shazam to grow its product and to build value for existing users, the artists and innovation.

He discussed the 4 Buckets of Users:

1. Lost soul - Someone who downloads an app and they're not quite sure what it was for, they may have clicked on an ad and downloaded it and then they forget about it.  
   
   To avoid this kind of user, follow a word-of mouth strategy and have a clear purpose of your app so that its functionality can be easily felt by your users. Be sure that the function of your app creates a “WOW” experience and educate your users on how to use it.  Keep them updated about the recent innovations and features. Retention rate matters so be sure that the users are using the app within the first month that they’ve downloaded it.
   
   



2. Utilitarian Users - someone who comes to your app once or twice a week, or once or twice a month.
   
   Think of how you can make such users come back to your app more often. The key point here is your product features and your continued innovation which ideally will convert the 'utilitarian' user into the 'explorer'.
   
   



3. Explorer  - someone who comes to your app, doesn't just use the main function of the app, but looks for new things, new functions, new ways to use the product.
   
   These users are the most important.  ‘Explorers’ help you to significantly improve your product. For example, you may notice some functions that they use that you have not thought about before.  Data also matters a lot: watch what your users do andwhat they see and gain insight from the way they are engaging.
   
   



4. Sharer - They share your content via social networks.
   
   This referral has significantly helped to drive massive amounts of new installs: the user not only claims that they like the content, but also the fact that the product is great. Make sure your product can be shared, because sharing is the best way to get people to download your app.  

Focus on  innovation - always think of  new ways that users can connect, never stand still.

Appness created the first marketplace of Facebook traffic that connects mobile application developers and third-party media buying experts from all over the world. They provide them with tools for transparent and effective collaboration.

In this session, Artenova discussed how media buying on Facebook works, and gives tips on making your Facebook ads work for your app. She also discusses media buying effectively and  spend less money to get high quality traffic.

In the 4th quarter of 2016, Facebook had 1.2B daily active users and 1.8B monthly active users, which certainly makes Facebook a great platform to promote products and services. Facebook has generated more 26B USD in 2016. Based on Facebook data of daily and monthly user, a large number of companies are already actively using Facebook as their core traffic source.

However, media buying on Facebook can be tricky because of strong bidding competition, non-performance models (you can buy only on CPC or CPM) and due to complicated optimization algorithm which are far from being transparent. 

These are are her 10 media buying hacks for FB.

1.       Create a Facebook fan page. It’s a great way to tell more people about your product. It is not enough to just to have a fan page. You need to post something attention-grabbing like cool videos, news about your product or whatever may be interesting to your audience. The more reactions your ad campaign gets from your audience, the more inexpensive traffic you will start receiving.
   
   



2.       Always delete inactive campaigns that don’t bring in any traffic on Facebook. Facebook policies often change and old campaigns can be banned due policy amendment.
   
   



3.       Use look-alike audiences. Experienced advertisers know that using lookalike audience or targeting people who are most likely to install your app and make purchases is very important. You may start from your low conservation groups, from these group you can exclude these people from your budget so as not to waste money on those who won’t be using your app or be campaign users.
   
   



4.       Control your budget. Learn how to allocate your money or keep a close eye on the amount you are spending on an ad campaign. Think that a significant or sudden change in the budget can break your Facebook campaign ad budget and the cost could definitely increase.
   
   



5.       Smart bidding is crucial and is everything to your ad campaign. Higher bids at the start of the campaign activates FB algorithm and lower CPIs.
   
   



6.       Increase budget steadily. Stick to the rule by scaling up your budget by 10-30% every couple of days.
   
   



7.       Ad placements. Instagram videos are more popular with people nowadays and it is one of the best ad placements on Facebook.
   
   



8.       Use emojis in the text. It lowers the cost of traffic and attracts people attention. It makes your ad stand out and your CTR increases with it.
   
   



9.       Add videos. It lowers the traffic for ad campaign. There are three levels you need take into consideration; the campaign, ad set and level of ad.  If one set of video shows good results you don’t need to create a new one rather just add videos to the same ad set this lowers the cost of the traffic.
   
   



10.   Call to action creatives. Use or play with words, e.g. discover, learn, or find out. Incite people’s reaction, thus increases the result. It helps active Facebook ad algorithm which is your main goal.

There is no universal or magical recipe to consistently get paying users at a low cost. The key to a successful Facebook ad campaign is to never stop experimenting, use fresh creative ideas and approaches that work best for your audience and your app.

In his presentation, Lukasz Leoniewski discusses how Facebook is looking at the Fintech business and why Russia plays a vital role across other Central Eastern European region in this industry. He cited that Central Eastern Europe has 28 strong market countries that produce technical talents that supply half of the world’s market like Silicon Valley. These countries have that entrepreneurial spirit which can be capitalized by business and be known globally. Fintech started in one of the CEE countries.

He then discussed the transforming power of the business and the opportunity on mobile discovery which is the driving power behind Fintech. The majority of their success emanates from using mobile as a platform.

Looking at the global economy, around two billion people are living outside the financial ecosystem and they don’t have access to basic service like online payments or credit.  They have to travel and pay more to access these services than most of us do. The mission of the business is to tap into this market and give people access to these services. The role of Fintech has democratized the financial services and its goal is to drive more businesses and include more people in the financial industry.

In the next phase of global business,  platforms and financial ecosystems and applications will transform the traditional industry. The financial sphere’s innovative way in delivery of its services is at scale. The business potential across different industries is big and more businesses are capitalizing on this opportunity.

The company is building on what mobile can give since it is a natural distribution platform for this kind of businesses. They are building opportunities such a mobile payments, personal lending, money transfers, insurtech, online trading and wealth management.

Mobile is creating new moments to reach people, based on statistics 78% of people have their phone with them all but 2 hours per day and 87% of millennials always have their phone at their side, day and night. This generation has financial access to this industry so we are able to reach this target group easily. 

In an organization, online and digitization are top priorities from top down. They have to capitalize and make marketing more effective to have a strategic advantage. To achieve good results there should be synergy across all departments within the business on how to capitalize on mobile first and to measure the results. 

Search is not a natural point of entry on mobile, The role of marketers in the business is to build this natural need by discovery methods. Based on a data gathered 25% of us spends more time on Facebook mobile advertising platform than the other ten brands combined, but mobile ad spend lags behind consumer consumption. There is a huge gap between what people believe is a priority and what they see internally in the business.

The business is scaling super-fast because of its competitive advantage. Looking at the road ahead, to be a global Fintech business you need to have a great mission that makes a difference. You must have amazing resources that can be sourced in this region like tech talent and entrepreneurial spirit, and connect it with mobile.

Andy Zmolek discusses enterprise apps and the tremendous growth in this market.

Android is the most widely used operating system. Global Android share of enterprise device sales has been marked at 68%. 

As a developer, you should know how to exploit data. Use the secure protocols, Use the local storage on the device to cache what you can. One of the most important things you can do is not interact with the device as you would a PC. Don’t think about the directories that are in the device and don’t use that mode of accessing files or saving files. If you do,  you’re going to compromise security. as the security model setup on Android works in a way in which one app cannot interact with other apps data. When you are putting application data outside in the file system, you’re also exposing it to any other app that might exist  on that device so you need to get out of that file system, get out of that mentality of “PC-OS type design”.

Zmolek goes on to discuss Single sign-on which he thinks very few are securely implementing in their apps. He encouraged developers to look into their apps and consider how the apps behave on a device that always has a keyboard.

He ended the discussion by reminding developers to use content URLs and not file URIs to make sure everything works properly when dealing with multiple profiles.

Speaker Matt Jones has been in the mobile industry since 2002, among the world’s biggest apps he developed was the Sony PlayStation app. He is currently working for Manning Gottlieb OMD as head of their mobile marketing strategy. 

In 2017 we live in a mobile 1st world. We check our phone on average 150 times a day; spend over 3 hours a day or more on our phone; 45% of us would rather give up a holiday than the phone; 82% of us use our phone in store before we buy something; 79% check our phones in 15 minutes upon waking up. In Europe, people have become so addicted to phones that they constantly look down on their phone even while on the streets. Sweden recently put traffic lights on the ground because of this behavior to avoid road accidents.

Mobile first companies are some of the biggest in the world. It has been a monopoly. 8 out of 10 top apps globally are owned by Facebook or Google. It’s a new world and gold rush. When you get it right, it can have huge impact on your business. When you have a misstep, then the market acts accordingly. Every business has been impacted by mobile. 

As presented, Domino’s Pizza considers them self as a technology company that sells pizza rather than a pizza business. In 2009-2010 they heavily invested in digital mobile technology and 80-90% of all pizza purchases from Dominos are made on a mobile device.

He discussed the four Pillars to building a mobile first business. Which are fundamental to mobile success.

1.       Mobile first customer experience – This is where most people are playing now and where a lot of investments are going.  How to improve customer experience - make the end-to-end experience easier, better and sleeker. The companies that are doing this are winning. The biggest issue is the the legacy infrastructure, which can be a barrier and an opportunity. This is an opportunity for people coming into the market as a non-established brand, building it from the ground. The biggest established players are taking a long time to adjust to this. When you build it, they will come. Globally when you build these mobile experiences, it takes away a huge share from desktops and other platforms. In the US and UK, 65-85% of all time spent on digital is done within mobile.
   
   



2.       Mobile first products - A new mobile product or service that provides a key consumer benefit.
   Think like a customer or an end-consumer, tie it up with your business objective and bring them together. It is hard for established businesses to do this because they concentrate more on their objectives rather on customers needs or wants. Make good decisions, act quickly, change and adapt.

3.       Mobile first marketing – Use interactive ads considering that mobile now dominates digital advertising. Online video consumption on mobile has seen a 2068% increase in the last 18 months. The millennials spend more time on their phone than watching TV. Two biggest growth areas that we are seeing as of the moment are on mobile video.
   
   



4.       Mobile first measurement - It’s about app performance and the real world advertising, which is 50-50 split brand campaigns and performance campaigns. An attribution partner is important to understand performance channel that can help business grow. Do not depend on downloads, you have to optimize to the right metric that focuses on KPI; your highest value customer and your audience segment.

You need to consider footfall and location as well. Footfall trend has taken off in the last 3 years. Footfall measurement delivers a complete ROI, great insight and demographic information.

Location targeting delivers impressive results; 2x average increase in positive brand perception and 2.5x average increase in store visitations.

As a parting message, Jones encourages the audience to focus on customer experience, customer behavior, where are they going and adapt accordingly.

Mr. Aksoy of Branch Metrics talked about how to turn your app into a growth engine. He started by giving a brief background of the company that was founded in June 2014. They developed deep linking infrastructure, and that’s how the Branch was born. In three years they now have 95 employees, 60% are engineers. They have offices in San Francisco, New York, India, Russia, and Brazil. There are 20,000 apps using deep links.

As we all know we live in an increasingly mobile world: 65% of digital media time in US, 33% of all US e-commerce sales; $245B mobile revenue in 2017. Statistics show that people uses mobile app 6x more that mobile web.  Apps provide users with a better user experience. Apps rule the mobile world. Apps convert 2x better than mobile browser; users are 2.5x as engaged as mobile web users.

He then discussed where Branch came in when they saw that linking on mobile is broken. Branch links solve mobile linking problem. Native apps are cut off from the world, and it’s almost impossible to attribute user data once they go to app store. Their product is universal and works across all marketing channels - email marketing, social media advertising, and content sharing. It drastically improves the growth and product engagement. Most of their partner users saw a tremendous amount of downloads, great increase of activated users; people started to share more of their content; overall this improves user experience. Branch is the deep linking infrastructure for world’s best apps. Results for partners who use deep links increase their sign ups by 180%, 200% on engagement and 190% in retention.

Discovery is a huge issue in the mobile ecosystem right now, 50,000 apps are being launched every month in the app store, how the algorithm works is actually pretty bad as they favor the big apps over new apps. It’s hard to get traction and there is a huge competition. Your works begin at launch, trying to find growth. Your mobile app is a growth engine using Branch.

You can create awareness either by paid advertising, SEO; press releases, word of mouth or inviting friends. However, you have to convince your users to download your app and use them. According to latest statistics 50% of users that download the app don’t open it at all. You also have to persuade your users that you have a valuable app that they can use day over day and convince them to share the app or content inside your app. 

Branch partners optimize user flow to drive conversion within these channels and drive web traffic to app. Others use smart banners that result in a better user experience. Some use affiliates which  app to app marketing but don’t force it on their users. You have to have a partner that is relevant to your users. You may use personalized welcomes/invitations, custom onboarding or content sharing. It increases engagement, however you need to make it relevant to the user experience.

He presented the Simple k factor (viral coefficient), that’s 0 to 1.5 to 2; over 1 – app is getting viral.

The formula to compute the k factor is to multiply the conversions from downloads to activated users x The active users to the sharing users x How many people are downloading the app from the shared content = K factor. Getting a 0 to 0.5 is not bad at all. 

Aksoy also discussed how to measure the download source; attribution is very important in that you have to optimize the welcome according to your audience and make the sharing align with the product to get users to share it naturally.  Aksoy also emphasized testing and failing - test on new ideas and improve on existing ideas.

In this session, Reid spoke about human approach to interaction design. In his field of work as a motion designer he constantly looks for better design, especially within animation as animators tend to mimic what happens in a real world from observing nature. It helps him understand everything from micro to macro interactions, which all come together in a perfect way to form the story and this experience that we called life.

What makes us human? It’s not our five senses because we share these senses with other species on the planet. What genuinely makes us human beings partly comes down to our feelings and emotions, our ability to perceive and articulate emotions felt in ourselves and others is what makes us unique. We are conscious beings, we are people that we can identify in ourselves and we can identify in others. This particular quality, if we tap into it more can shape how we move forward.

He then asked, “Does our design and technology reflect our feelings and emotions?” Design and technology is such a huge genre.

Smartphone nowadays are an extension of us as human beings. It is in everything that we do. Everything that we do now is tapped into a mobile device and an application. It is an intermediate device which is between us human beings and our physical world around us. We are putting in all of our trust, emotions, everything, our whole identity into a manmade digital device. How are we going to make it more about us? Social media reflects this in some ways. We go to social media for validation as a human beings – we want the likes, the thumbs up, the friend requests.

We all try to seek a unique way to express ourselves. And it is not just about the validation, it is about the chemical release that happens in our bodies. It’s the endorphins that are released, this now becomes an addictive activity, which is why all of us are now addicted to social media, we want more of it, constantly. If we understand the psychology behind this, it can lead us in terms how we move forward with our businesses and designs.

What is important in creating a design? Colors evokes emotion, are culturally relevant and have different connotations. We can identify with this in a psychological way. Words, dialogues and the use of humor in your app which make it more human and conversational. Evoking emotions and feelings through characters or emojis are universal and understood worldwide. We can also display emotions through movement of characters. Take for example, fast animations - this creates a mood of urgency and excitement; sharp and dynamic. Smooth velocity - it creates a mood of calm and control; elegant motion design. By using design movement, it creates completely a different feeling and story.      

For Reid, every moment, every element within your app is an opportunity to tell a story; evoke an emotion and resonate deeply with your users – every single key point. You have to tap into certain levels of psychology and their emotions to feel a certain way. Feelings are universal. Make your app universal by leading with your feelings first. The greatest power in technology is to make our humanity, the forefront of anything and everything we do, and emotionally connect us more.