Tim Letscher

If there is one overarching theme coming out of The Wall Street Journal’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference, it’s that the future is in your pocket.

It’s no surprise that a conference focused on mobile is going to claim that mobile is the future, but when the executive chairman of Google, the CEO of Mozilla and the CTO of engineering for Facebook are doing the talking, it can’t be ignored. As Mike Schroepfer, the CTO of Facebook said, “If you’re building for the Web, you’re doing it wrong.” It wasn’t just tech companies evangelizing this message either. Bob Bowman, president of Major League Baseball Advanced Media said, “We’re big believers that this [phone] screen is the first screen. Anybody that doesn’t believe that is living on another planet or doesn’t have children. Reality is the second screen.”

That brings up another point made clear during the conference: For younger generations, mobile is their primary avenue of communication. Nancy Lublin, CEO of the nonprofit DoSomething.org, reaches more than a million teens every week via Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, but her number one way of reaching them is SMS. In fact, her organization boasts a 97 percent open rate on SMS, with an average reply time of just 14 minutes. If you want to reach a teen, it better be on mobile.

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel illustrated an adoption pattern worth noting. His ephemeral photo-sharing app was widely adopted by teenagers, followed by an older generation representing the teens’ parents. Only then did the millennial generation start to catch on, an adoption pattern to remember the next time you’re launching an app or a marketing program. To put Snapchat’s success in perspective, Instagram gets 45MM photo uploads a month. Snapchat gets 150MM. Why? Spiegel said, “We believe the default should be ephemerality.” The notion of ephemerality is worth watching. The permanence of Facebook or the self-aware nature of Instagram and Twitter restrict us, in a way in which we are consciously publishing a piece of our idealized self. Snapchat is very much in the moment and in many ways is closer to everyday conversations that live on in memory rather than on your permanent record. Brands should acknowledge this shift and consider moving some resources in this direction to attract this audience.

Notably absent from the conference was Apple. While execs from Snapchat, Waze and WhatsApp were there to represent iOS app success, most off-the-cuff comments about the future of mobile centered on Android. The open nature of the Android operating system plays perfectly into mobile, especially when thinking of mobile as a context and less as a device. If the context is a house or a car or a backyard, the versatility of Android can adapt to that setting. As marketers, we need to design for this future, giving more weight to location and time of day, rather than device. This way, we can put context data to use to deliver the kind of relevant stuff that makes peoples’ lives easier, productive and fulfilling.