Collision 2017 was a treasure trove of knowledge. From entrepreneurship to AI to activism to mobile, the speakers shared their experiences and advice with thousands and thousands of attendees. At Branch, we care a lot about mobile and the strategies that many executives have used to connect with users on mobile devices. Through a combination of 1:1 interviews and tidbits taken from the stage, here are the 5 most important things said about mobile at Collision 2017:
Jody Mulkey, CTO, Ticketmaster
“We have built some technology and are live on it, where basically, mobile ticketing and mobile is your entry device. It’s already there. We have a venue that is 100% digital tickets. And every ticket is either digital or IRFD embedded paper, a smart ticket. And so with that, you take fraud to 0. They’ve had 0 fraud in 4 home games, where last year they had 150 instances of fraud per game. 0 fraud. And this is the fraud where someone buys a ticket, they make 10 copies, the first one to use the ticket gets in, the other 9 people have the worst experiences of their life. I saw it myself two years ago at One Direction at the Rose Bowl, where dozens of 13-year-old girls [were] crying their eyes out because they had bought fraudulent tickets.
The mobile app solves that. It also solves the ability to identify those fans. So, if I can identify you, I can remarket to you, I can give you social offers, I can tell you: ‘Hey, everyone in section 301 gets free popcorn, or hey, there’s a 6-year-old lost on the upper concourse’
Because you’ve entered with your mobile app, you have a reason to have our app, now we have an engagement platform for marketing, safety, those kinds of things. It’s totally changed our space, mobile has grown like crazy, if you listen to the earnings call this afternoon you’ll hear some insane mobile growth numbers, it’s totally changed how people buy tickets, and their whole live event experience has changed because of mobile.”
Jamie Moldafsky, CMO, Wells Fargo
“There’s no question that we’ll continue to evolve, we’ll continue to innovate on mobile and digital first. We’ll just continue to make those right shifts, but we feel very confident that we have the capacity to invest in mobile and digital first.”
“Because we are so complex now in terms of channels, and customer segments, and social media, the introduction of all these different ways to engage with our customers, we need to have that sort of traffic control, if you will.”
Alan Boehme, CTO, The Coca-Cola Company
“Mobile is everything. Today, I hate to say, but all of us standing here have more processing power in our hands than we had on our desktops a few years ago. The reality is, the world is mobile, everything you do is mobile today, you just have to accept it. Things are connected to the cloud, everything is cloud. We’re just talking about a constant in-motion compute capability for collaboration, for exchange of ideas, exchange of knowledge. There are many different apps coming out from third parties that you can get in the app store, there’s businesses that are creating things. I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this yet.”
“We have hundreds of apps, apps for the Olympics, apps for FIFA, we have apps to interact with our freestyle machines, so there’s constant interaction going on between human beings that are moving and machines that are stationary. In addition, we’ve done things with billboards where apps have interacted with billboards, or people have interacted with billboards through a mobile app, you should be able to have a point of happiness anywhere in the world at any given time, and that’s what we’re trying to do. Technology creates that bridge that bridges people and systems together.”
Alec Oxenford, CEO, Letgo
“There’s a number of things that coincided [with our growth]. There was clearly a huge need for an app like ours, and the incumbents, namely Craigslist, hadn’t innovated for 15 years. So there was a huge latent, dormant demand that we ignited. Now, we’ve done this through multiple channels. We’ve communicated a lot, we’ve used marketing extensively in every possible channel: offline, online, social networks, Google, Twitter, Facebook, broadcast, radio. But mostly, it’s been the product. We have a very sophisticated product team, with high caliber artificial intelligence experts that work day in and day out to try to make sure that we really are able to – from all the data we get from our users – understand their patterns of behavior and offer them exactly what they’re looking for, before they actually look for it.”
Jager McConnell, CEO, Crunchbase
“One of our most asked for features when I joined Crunchbase was to get a mobile app. We didn’t have one. We had a web mobile app, and we asked is that enough? And the answer was clearly no. We had users interacting on a daily basis, our users always need that information, no matter where they are, and the [mobile app] unlocked that for them. We actually don’t want them to ever have to go to the desktop, because I think the desktop is dying. That mobile app experience is something that we need to build up to be something that is beautiful and amazing and fast and awesome, so that users can get the full Crunchbase experience.”
