Hold wants you to put down your phone and reward you – this is how marketing can be more mindful of our health
There's a famous quote by graffiti artist Banksy from 2004 about advertising that’s too long to post here, but in summary accuses “The Advertisers” of butting into consumers’ lives with ads that “leer at you from tall buildings, and make you feel small”.
An oversimplification, of course, and perhaps a glib way to start a marketing feature in a business newspaper, but it’s hard to deny that we are constantly bombarded by marketing, whether it’s from our work computer, in the media we consume, or even while we’re walking to work and waiting at a tube stop.
Since Banksy made his 2004 statement, mobiles and smartphones have come to dominate our lives and are a major source of advertising.
We spend an average of three and a half hours on our phones every day, according to stats from eMarketer, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau notes that mobile ads now make up 56.7 per cent of total internet ad revenues.
Marketers are benefiting from our obsession with constantly checking our phones, even though this distracts us from our work and the time we spend with friends and family. The negative impacts of phones and social media on our physical and mental health are well-known.
So should advertisers use their power more responsibly? Can marketing be more mindful?
Holding out
Hold is a Norwegian tech firm that’s trying to tackle these questions. It has designed an app that rewards users for not looking at their phones.
Aimed at university students, users accumulate 10 points for every full 20 minutes that they don’t check their phones between 7am and 11pm.
These points can be used to claim vouchers, discounts, and free products on the app’s marketplace from companies such as Vue cinemas, restaurant chain Wagamama, and snack box Graze. For instance, a few hours of ignoring your phone nets enough points for free popcorn at a cinema.
This digital detox is meant to help students reduce their screen-time and boost their productivity with the promise of a reward.
And as a business, Hold makes money from brands which pay to be featured on the marketplace in order to advertise to students.
It all started in 2016, when three students at the Copenhagen Business School found that they struggled to focus while studying.
“We checked our phones way too often,” admits Hold’s chief executive and co-founder Maths Mathisen. “We started a game where the one who checked their phone last got a coffee when we had a break.”
Mathisen and his friends decided to take that simple idea – of “gamifying” offline time to help students focus on more important things – and turn it into an app.
“We started back in Norway, that was our home market, and we saw amazing traction. We’ve now got something like 50 per cent of students in Norway using Hold,” he claims.
While the app was initially focused on Norway and Sweden, it has attracted over 200,000 students in the UK since launching here in March.
Healthy relationship
But Mathisen didn’t create the app just to help people claim free stuff. He hopes that by incentivising students to stay away from their phone and not be distracted, they will feel more focused, productive, and have better mental health.
“You actually feel worse sometimes (from browsing social media), because people are only posting the best part of themselves – you want to show how cool your life is and how many friends you have, but it doesn’t show the real you,” Mathisen says.
“There are so many great opportunities with the phone. With Hold, we want to make sure that you are making use of the best sides of this technology, and help combat the worst sides.”
At the moment, the app is focused on students, but it has the potential to help all sorts of people, from office workers to those with families who feel they are constantly distracted by the urge to check their phone. Mathisen hopes to widen the app’s scope to other demographics in the future, as well as expand into other markets around Europe and the world.
Push and pull
What does all this mean for marketing? Well, on top of trying to foster a more positive relationship between students and their phones, Hold is also looking to build a better relationship between consumers and marketers – once the user does pick up their phone, they’ll spend time browsing through the brands advertised on Hold’s marketplace to choose which vouchers they want to exchange points for.
This is better than the usual approach to mobile marketing, where brands pester consumers with push notifications, pop-ups, banner ads, or pre-roll video ads. These techniques – known as push marketing – can be effective, as they allow small or lesser known companies to raise awareness. But they can also be detrimental for a brand if they’re an annoyance, or worse, interrupt a user while they’re trying to work or study.
“A lot of brands use push marketing, they put banners at the top of articles you want to read, and so on. But then you have a negative connection to the marketing, because it’s something that you don’t want to see right now,” explains Mathisen.
“At Hold, the students are in charge of when they want to be marketed to.”
Mathisen hopes that Hold will encourage more advertisers to consider their alternative “pull marketing” approach, where consumers actively seek out a brand that they’re interested in. Hold shows that it is possible to advertise brands in a way that is responsible, healthy, and incentivises positive behaviour.
As someone who checks their phone at work far too often, it is certainly a service I hope to start using soon.