Hotels.com’s Xtreme mobile booking campaignListening to the speakers at this morning’s brand and agency briefing, hosted by the MMA, it’s miles clear how quickly things have changed for the industry over the past six months. But it is all much more symbolic of the way quickly things are changing at all times in mobile.

Hotels.com is now working in 40 countries in 16 languages and has seen greater than 15m downloads across seven different apps. “For us, this has really been a narrative of transformation,” said Yannick Barriol, director or mobile marketing at Hotels.com. But as 20 per cent of its bookings are actually made through a mobile device, the channel isn’t new for them to any extent further. “Mobile isn’t the small fast-growth channel it was. It’s already big and still growing fast.”

The company sees 70 per cent of mobile bookings made at the same day, with most of these done after 6pm – really last minute – and its T.V. ads continue to mirror that. Its latest campaign, that’s currently running in Australia, sees a pair getting hot and heavy in a boost. ‘Need a room’ the ad asks. Save your blushes and use the app to book for your way up. a prior victim was filmed booking while jumping out of a plane.

Hotels.com have been working with Fetch on its app marketing for greater than two years. Matt Champion, media services director, said that the partnership has transformed his company in addition. “A question that did not exist two years ago – ‘do we’d like local presence’. Mobile makes it easy to scale globally but you usually need to have some local presence.” The corporate is recruiting native speakers from South America and China to guarantee they deliver the proper mobile creative for his or her client.

Facebook is top five for mobile ads

In the last six months alone, Facebook has gone from being non-existent in hotels.com’s mobile option to being within the top five mobile advertising platforms it uses. “Six months ago, Facebook was nowhere. It has now gone to being a top five supplier for us for hotels.com,” Champion said. “We’ve used 107 suppliers during the last two years. Today we’re live with about 40. It’s really gone from zero to hero in about six months and it is extremely interesting and that i don’t think we’ve seen the tip of that. Twitter gets at the page over a better year.”

Barriol said that mobile has changed the corporate from being an internet marketplace to an entire-blown retailer. “We now must understand customers even better – where they’re what they need – and be more clever about what we’re offering. They don’t have time to browse among thousands of hotel so we’re looking to push relevant hotels and news to our customers in the meanwhile they want it. It’s forced us to become a retailer and a clever retailer.”

They at the moment are aligning all in their products, supply chain and marketing around mobile, including their email CRM and search strategy.

Mobile transforms King.com into just King

I You know you’ve gone viral when…n another sign of just how much mobile is changing businesses, King.com, makers of the hit Candy Crush game, have rebranded simply as King. “It has changed so radically within the last 5 or 6 months. Being often called king.com isn’t really relevant anymore,” said Michael Bayston, international sales director.

King’s Candy Crush is now the biggest game on Facebook and the corporate has 50m daily active users across all of its platforms. This user base has grown by 27m inside the last five months alone and 52 per cent of these are using mobile. From having an audience on desktop that was 75 per cent female, on mobile it’s now only 56 per cent. Its audience is now younger and more affluent than ever before.

“Things really changed with Facebook,” he said, “35 per cent of our downloads are due specifically to cross promotion of Facebook games. With Facebook connect, it fully syncs with a purpose to pick the sport back up wherever and whenever they prefer. Those that play and fix with Facebook, as opposed to just downloading the app, are more loyal, spend more time playing our games, spend extra money and so they promote our games with other folks.”

Bayston said that folks in China are joining Facebook simply so they are able to play the Candy Crush. Over one sixth of the population in Hong Kong play it. He emphasised that they are not simply games any longer, calling what King now produces ‘mobile digital content’.

More free downloads, more money

On the company’s commitment to freemium mobile gaming, Bayston said that this makes it so much easier to make your friend or get some other person to aim it. “People expect it to be free. Free content is here to remain. You’d think it’d be bad but 80 per cent of mobile games revenue comes from free games.” He also said that games acting as a service, like giving the user free wi-fi for a download, give opportunities for monetisation. “People don’t realise that if the app is paid for, when downloads go down, revenues go down. With free downloads, because the variety of downloads goes down, revenues go up because those users usually tend to buy inside the game.”

Candy Crush now has greater than 300 levels and King has to maintain adding more content for all time. “Feeding the beast,” as Bayston called it.