I really believe that mobile is the front door to business today. In six short years, it's been the dominant way in which consumers interact with their favourite brands. In fact, Deloitte Digital said that 64% of all transactions are influenced by digital, with mobile making up more than 60% of that, and the mobile influence factor has increased by 500 times in three years, which is pretty impressive. And it's doubled every year since 2012, really showing that rapid pace of change.

And what ties into that, is the idea of the traditional marketing funnel being blown to bits. On the Gartner blog, Jake Sorofman had this great quote - he believes in the idea that the linear marketing funnel, the awareness and consideration to purchase and to loyalty is broken, and has been blown to bits by the rise of the conceptive consumer in a decision journey that looks more like the flight of the bumblebee. So, you think about that, that old funnel where you progressed through and you could really track how somebody would engage with your brand, has been all messed up. The old linear model was this idea of pushing content to a broad base of potential customers, and you're essentially really renting access to them. It's kind of like having a sales display that you pay for in the grocery store or a banner ad on a website, but after that interaction, the customer's no longer yours.

But that's different with mobile, because somebody has raised their hand and put your app on their device. So that's a really interesting shift, this new model is consumer-driven, it's data-driven, it includes push and pull and it's based on relevance and context. And you think about it, we're all really channel surfers - you guys on the line right now are probably checking your email, you have multiple choices to interact with brands, and those interactions are on multiple devices. We may be looking at it on our phone now, but go back to the same brand experience on the desktop web at home. Those interactions are on our own terms, and it's really the first step of a mobile journey, the interaction with a brand on a mobile device and downloading their app.

That's interesting, because once you've downloaded that app and raised your hand to say that you are interested in the brand, it opens up all those different engagement signals that are kind of interesting. So, just as every click, view and download shows intent as someone engages, you can actually track those and tag those, and some of those signals are higher value than others.