Digital Dealer - January 2020 - 34

MARKETING & ADVERTISING

Video

By
Thomas R. Pearce
Sr. Director of Interactive
UI/UX Strategy,
Autodata Solutions

Lately, more-and-more fascinating data on
mobile playback of video content is being
released. According to The Denver Post, "72%
of millennials said they don't rotate their
phones to watch videos horizontally."4

Mobile-First Video - Next Wave
of Mobile First Revolution

The insurgency of mobile

trafﬁc to automotive websites
forced dealerships to become
mobile compliant as the numbers
crashed through the 50% mark in
October 2016.3 Mobile-ﬁrst websites are
now the norm. And the next wave of the
"Mobile-First" digital revolution is at hand,
as we cross the threshold to the area of
"Mobile-First Video." It is a paradigm shift
in automotive video advertising and a great
opportunity for dealerships, agencies, and
OEMs to make full use of the vertical mobile-ﬁrst canvas.
After reading this article, my hope is,
you'll never look at smartphone use the
same way. Around your environment, regardless of demographics, you'll see people
using smartphones in a particular manner.
When developing new product strategies,
my User Experience (UX) team assembles
the best in class UX practices; user group,
user studies, and heuristic evaluations, but
you don't need all that elaborate formality
to see what's happening with the utilization of smartphones.

[ d i g i t a l d e a l e r. c o m ]

Let's ask ourselves a question right off
the bat. How far in terms of inches or feet,
do you think the average person scrolls
on his/her smartphone each day on social
media? Would you guess 5, 10, 50 feet or
estimate something else? Well, the average
American scrolls about 300 feet on social
media every day.1 That's about 21 miles a
year. If we started today, in just one year,
we can go from the Las Vegas Strip to the
Hoover Dam. What that means is, there is
some serious scrolling going on, and the
vast majority of it is done vertically.
About nine years ago, during my daughter's dance recital, I noticed parents recording the performance vertically, in a portrait
mode on their phone. My heart poured
out because I knew they would have those
horrible side black bars when they playback
the recital at home on their widescreen TV.
I thought, eventually, they would ﬁgure it
out, but nine years later people exhibit the
same behavior.
A few weeks ago, I was in Motor City
seeing my boys, the rock band KISS. I was
backstage with, Paul Stanley, Gene Sim-

mons, Erik Signer, and Tommy Thayer. It
was an awesome show, and even the picture
backstage was taken vertically. During the
show, I looked out in the audience and what
did I see in Detroit Rock City? The audience
recording and taking photos vertically in
the portrait. This is what I want you to do
when you're out witnessing people using
their phones, taking pictures, shooting
video, and viewing video. It's testament to
how people use their phones, they prefer
to use them in the vertical mobile-ﬁrst
position.
Lately, more-and-more fascinating data
on mobile playback of video content is being released. According to The Denver Post,
"72% of millennials said they don't rotate
their phones to watch videos horizontally."4
There's a good reason for these statistics. Long before smartphones, stone tools
evolved to naturally ﬁt in the palm of our
hands. Our ancestors had to use them to
chop some meat off a woolly mammoth or
something, and it needed to do it as efﬁcient as possible. From a 30,000 foot-level,
when comparing stone tools to smart-

January 2020

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Digital Dealer - January 2020

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