Consider this: Of the 166 million active U.S. Facebook users, 111 million of them came from a phone or tablet [1]. Mobile search has grown more than 400% in the past year. 12% of all global Internet traffic is through mobile. 71% of in-home mobile use is done while watching TV, and more than 40% of people say they surf the web while watching TV.
Technology knows your website is being served on an iPhone or a Galaxy or a netbook or a desktop running Windows 98. Technology knows mobile or desktop, Monday morning rush hour or Thursday evening couch surfing. It's time to offer relevant content that's aware of context.
While it's fantastic when a website responds to a screen dimension, intelligently adjusting its layout to fit at optimal pixels, wouldn't it be great if the content also knew it was approaching dinner time and surfaced rich content that helped prepare a meal? Or if you are surfing during the lean-back hours of the evening, why not serve up entertaining webisodes as option one? The technology is there. The data is there. Is your content?
It’s neither too narrow nor is it a privacy issue for a brand to surface content that is a best guess at what you might want depending on time, place and device. This strategy doesn't apply to every brand, but it works for a kids’ breakfast cereal that can offer games, recipes and coupons, or an energy bar that heavily aligns with an outdoor lifestyle and offers branded content and nutritional information. Everything on the website should still be fully accessible, but like a clothing store in the real world, this is akin to being approached by a salesperson who makes some assumptions just based on visual observations. It’s a natural behavior to filter our world, and with so much available data, brand websites should be doing the same.
[1] Facebook internal data source
