Piers Mummery, CEO of digital media and advertising service BrightMove Media on social media, taxis and more
Social Media Portal (SMP): What is your name and what do you do there at BrightMove Media?Piers Mummery (PM): I?m
Piers Mummery, CEO of BrightMove Media. I am responsible for the all our marketing, business development and communications.
SMP: Briefly, tell us about BrightMove Media (for those that don?t know), what is it and what does company do?
PM: BrightMove Media is a digital media service which uses the top of London?s iconic black taxis as its ad space, providing clients with real-time digital geo-targeted advertising. It is currently the only approved product of its kind on the road in the UK and allows brands to communicate the right message at the right time to the right people, marketing nirvana!
SMP: Who are your target audience and why?PM: Any brand that wants to reach potential and existing customers in a creative, targeted and innovative way!
SMP: What were you doing before you joined BrightMove Media and how did you snag your current job?PM: Prior to founding BrightMove Media, I was managing director at Shoots Garden Centres, a chain of small to medium sized garden centres focused on the family market that I co-founded and launched in 2004. The business was sold successfully in 2011 to Squires Garden Centres. Since 2003, I have also held and continue to hold the role of managing director at MTwo Ventures Ltd., an advisory company that provides entrepreneurs, SMEs and start-ups with development, finance and real-life advice.
SMP: Briefly, what does your job entail and what does a typical day look like?
PM: Every day is different, but I might start a typical day by checking progress on our network expansion. Much of my time is also spent servicing existing clients, creating bespoke solutions to achieve their advertising needs and identifying new business opportunities.
SMP: What makes it a great job?PM: It is a great feeling to be pioneering a technology which is bringing something as iconic as the London taxi into the 21st century. Being its 150th year, this year has been the year of the London bus, but next year Londoners will be seeing the new taxis all over London, making 2015 the year of the taxi!
SMP: How did you initially attract users to site, social channels et al and how do you do it now?PM: BrightMove?s story is highly visual. As soon as you see one of our screens, you can understand what we are trying to do. It is for this reason that Facebook and Twitter were the social media channels that we focused on when we launched the company. We attracted users to the site by running competitions, campaigns to get people engaged and kept people updated with regular blog posts and news announcements.
Increasingly, LinkedIn is becoming important as a way to keep in touch with our drivers, suppliers, agencies and brands.
SMP: What are the challenges that you?ve encountered and how are you overcoming them in what you have been doing so far at BrightMove Media?PM: Being the first of its kind, BrightMove Media?s technology needed approval from Transport for London and the London Mayor?s office to ensure it met with road and safety requirements.
Another challenge was the design ? the screens had to be small enough to fit under London?s lowest points whilst maintaining the high quality offering to ensure prestigious advertisers. They also had to comply with the government?s Clean Air Act, which required more time to be spent on the design process.
To overcome these obstacles, we spent time perfecting our LED screen design to ensure a compliant solution that did not compromise on the delivery of a cutting-edge visual advertising platform.
SMP: What are the high moments of what you have been doing so far?PM: Our proudest moment so far was definitely when we received approval from Transport for London in June. This allowed us to begin the process of expanding our network. In October we will welcome another 400 screens (200 taxis) onto the streets of London and by the end of 2014, our network will have grown by a whopping 700 screens.
SMP: What do you see as your biggest challenges and opportunities for brands?PM: We give brands the opportunity to broadcast highly targeted digital advertising throughout London. The system maintains location awareness via GPS, allowing advertisers to tailor their campaigns to specific locations or areas of London, and to collate information on when, where and how often their adverts have been seen.
SMP: What do you think is going to be the most interesting aspect regarding social media in the next 12 to 18-months and why?
PM: Since launching BrightMove, we are seeing more and more brands look for new ways to reach the right audiences and I think that demand is here to stay. I believe that over the next 18 months, this demand will cause traditional platforms such as billboards or bus stop adverts to combine with technology to become more sophisticated and targeted.
SMP: What are your top five predictions for social media for the next 12 to 18-months?PM replies with:
- An increasing concern with privacy. Following the high profile leak of ?those? celeb photos recently, it?s likely that more people will start to ask how well social media services protect their privacy. This is always going to be an issue, but events like this serve to remind people of the potential risks they face when sharing their private photos and other information online, particularly in popular social media channels.
- Pay to play. From a marketing perspective it looks as though businesses are going to have to get used to the idea of paying to get the best results for their social media campaigns. Both Twitter and Facebook are publically listed now, and under pressure to deliver returns for shareholders, which means they?ll be finding new ways to extract money from the brands which want to engage with consumers on their channels.
- Reinventing content. The success of channels like BuzzFeed and Ampp3d has shown that there?s a real appetite for content in a format that?s designed to appeal to the social media generation. That message will start to spread and we?ll see others cashing in on the trend towards bite-size, visual, highly sharable content.
SMP: What are your top overall five social media tips?- Be honest. Adopt your own tone of voice and tweet on what interests you. People can easily see through company messaging.
- Keep a level head. Sometimes things can become quite heated over the Twitter. The trick is to know when to step back before you say something you will regret and don?t say anything you wouldn?t say in person.
- Don?t forget to pick up the phone. More often than not networking is now done over LinkedIn or Twitter. Nothing beats meeting in person and building face-to-face relationships.
SMP: Best way to contact you and BrightMove Media?
PM: You can find BrightMove?s website a
www.brightmovemedia.com or we?re also on twitter
@brightmovemedia
Now some questions for fun
SMP: What did you have for breakfast / lunch?PM: Like most, I am trying to be healthy! So breakfast was bran flakes and lunch was a chicken salad.
SMP: What?s the last good thing that you did for someone?PM: We have recently given away free advertising for a worthwhile charity.
SMP: If you weren?t working at BrightMove Media what would you be doing?PM: I am entrepreneurial by nature, so if I hadn?t launched BrightMove Media, I would most likely be working on another venture.
SMP: When / where did you go on your last holiday and why?PM: My family and I recently went to Crete, with the aim of relaxing!
SMP: What?s the first thing you do when you get into the office of a morning?PM: I check in with the BrightMove team, then make a start on my emails.
SMP: If you had a superpower what would it be and why?PM: I would like to be able to be invisible. You could overhear a lot of interesting conversations!