In the opening keynote at Mobile Marketing Strategies, Jonathan Gorski kicked off the conference with a presentation that similar to what I imagine the ESPN ad agency pitch deck looks like. But data is what Jonathan does, and data is what he delivered. Some highlights:
- This past Sunday, ESPN users logged 263 million minutes on their mobile products.
- The average sports consumer uses 1.3 apps for their sports consumption, so they make their choice and expect one app to deliver most of what they need.
- Of the top 25 mobile traffic days of the year, 23 are Saturdays and Sundays in the fall, and the other two are a certain Thursday and Friday in March.
The numbers continued, and suffice it to say if you left the presentation unaware that mobile is important to ESPN and its users, then you weren't paying attention.
If I had a beef with the presentation, it was that it fell short of giving tips to the marketers in the room on how to emulate ESPN's success. As attendee @ianmcdonald tweeted, "ESPN are huge and i mean HUGE on mobile - get that. Will they reveal the interesting bit, *how* they did it?"
In the Q&A, an attendee asked Gorski how ESPN markets their apps. The answer, in essence, was "we don't." It is a great thing that ESPN is sports' #1 media brand, but there aren't a lot of people in the room that can utilize a "launch app and watch users flock" strategy to their mobile marketing.
