Mobile Marketing

    Spotlight On Social Media – Today and…

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    Spotlight on Social Media was held yesterday in NYC, put on by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) and Direct Marketing Association (DMA).  There were a couple of important takeaways every marketer should think about. 

    Intent.

    Search is still important, no doubt, but it’s a little 2008.  Immediacy – what’s happening now — is the rolling thunder these days, so services like Twitter and Foursquare are the rage but the marketing future is something Rapleaf’s co-founder Vivek Sodera calls “intent driven” applications. Think of a suped up Four Square To Do tab. Facebook will certainly build an intent-based app and others in the VC pipeline will emerge, but just know intent+social+search+moblie is going to pay out lotto style. 

    Unanonymous

    I know, I know it’s not a word. But it’s a better word then unanonymize, which is the word that clanked like a dropped crowbar off Mr. Sodera’s tongue during his presentation.  Hee hee. That said, it’s a word that wonderfully describes what Rapleaf does. Rapleaf crawls the web and creates single records of an individual’s behaviors, activities and associations.  And surprisingly, it’s not that scary.  They do this using your email address and a cool piece of software. In email or direct parlance they append records using the social web. When I asked to be unanonymized, the Rapleaf software generated 100 of my web proclivities, the first of which was something called “Social Care” a membership I did not recall.  All the rest were spot on. 

    Facebook

    Facebook also presented at Spotlight and mentioned its 60 million daily logins put prime time television to shame. Sean Mahoney’s case studies of marketer successes were very impressive and prove that Facebook is the “new” digital. Its targeting capabilities are phenomenal.  There are specialty ad and marketing shops opening up just to handle Facebook-enabled selling and they’re worth looking in to.  It’s a cottage industry on the way to becoming transformational.   

    Others

    Other smart companies worth mentioning include Acxiom, a behemoth company that also transforms social data into social profiles (for targeted marketing), Cisco which has a neat B2B app in its NowVan program (like Kogi BBQ trucks for routers) and Air Miles a rewards program out of Canada, trying hard and having very good success. 

     Michael Della Penna of the PMN and Conversa Marketing and Neil O’Keefe of DMA deserve shout outs for empanelling a great program. Peace..it together!

    Smartphone Apps Flowing Like Mothers Milk.

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    Milk Monitor is an application available from the AppStore. It allows iPhone (and possibly iPad) toting moms to tap and record their babies milk consumption. The data can be stored, reviewed and trended at a later date.  Apparently moms like to do this kind of stuff – typically using bits of paper and napkins when recording on the road.  If you have a baby on your shoulder tapping is better than typing.  If you are carrying a smartphone around anyway and recording this data helps – especially for fussy babies — this is a great application. Go iPhone!  Go app developer!

    Application development at the smartphone level is like life on another planet.  There are currently 80 trillion apps (JK) for the iPhone today and about 6,000 for the PC (please don’t retweet, I didn’t count).  Now most iPhone apps don’t get used, but that’s not the point.  Some may. Some may help. Some will even save lives. And that’s cool.

    Just as Twitter will open new doors for smart marketers, smartphones and their apps will open new rooms for marketers.  The application developers who think like people first and coders second are the ones who will win.  

    The developer of Milk Monitor deserves congratulations two times: one for the app, one for the new bouncing baby she’s feeding. Peace!

    Intelligent Clothes Tagging.

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    Within a couple of years many newly manufactured clothes will contain inexpensive invisible data tags.  Much like a scanner tag you find on packaged goods these tags will contain brand name, style, store and price.  What will make them unique, however, is that they’ll be scannable via phone applications.  See a cool pair of shoes on the street?  Just point-and-click and immediately know what the item is. Think of it as a paparazzi for clothing thing.  Sure it will be annoying…but we’ll live with it.

    As this service gets more sophisticated and cheaper and the geo-location and privacy implications resolved, manufactures and marketers will be able to aggregate data and read that in Brooklyn, 200,000 people are walking around in Chuck Tailors on Friday but only 75,000 people on Wednesday.  We’ll know black tee-shirts outnumber red 2:1 on Monday and sundresses are really worn on sunny days.

     And don’t even get me started about clothing tags tied to coupons, promotions, search terms or Twitter codes.  I can’t even process that.  For that add two more years. Peace!  

     PS.  This is but one chapter in my worldwide inventory theory.

    RIM needs a (name) change.

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    Research In Motion needs a name change.  Don’t fight the people.  Change the name to Blackberry.  

    Next issue, the company needs to go on offense; it’s been playing Dee too long. Readers will know how I felt about “Love” as the branding idea for its bazillion dollar ad campaign.  Not good.

    RIM will announce quarterly results today and they are not expected to be pretty.  The worldwide smart phone market share leader, RIM is in the sights of Google’s fast growing Android operating system. And design-wise Apple iPhones have captured the imagination of the masses. So where does that leave RIM?  In a storm? Getting torched? Kind of where AOL was 8 years ago.  Or Yahoo was 3 years ago.  A leader treading water in a pool that is leaking. Leaking into a much bigger surrounding pool. RIM needs to see the future and go there. Right now it leads in business email. It leads in qwerty interface. It leads in web access, but these three things have diluted (another water metaphor) its brand idea. Hence love. 

    Come on Blackberry. Fight back. Peace!

    Thinking Apps.

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    Slide 4 in Mary Meekers’s Morgan Stanley presentation entitled “Internet Trends 2010” shows the pace of mobile internet adoption.  It compares iPhone/iTouch to that of  AOL’s desktop, Netscape desktop and NTT docomo iMode; laying out growth by users, by quarter from launch.

    iPhone’s Internet access tipped 86 million users in its 11th quarter – less than 3 years.  Let’s just say the others never came close to coming close. (Check out the chart on slide 4.) Smartphone growth is hockey sticking. Motorola is starting to get it. HP bought Palm and should buy some corporate share.  Blackberry is too big and too rich to fail, even though they’re getting a little paunchy around the middle. And we haven’t even started to talk about the software guys Google (after its trivestiture), Microsoft (drawing a blank) and carrier switch provider Alcatel-Lucent.

    Ladies and germs, smartphones are the future of computing, commerce and community. They will dock next to monitors and keyboards, but they are the device.  Think about the iPhone4’s new videoconference app. Wait for fingerprint apps, and galvanic skin response apps, sobriety apps….   Cool times, these.  Marketers, put on your thinking apps (I mean caps), innovation awaits! Peace!

    Mobi-sodes

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    The next big thing will be a video webisodes channel for mobile devices. More and more today, you see people on trains and benches staring down at their mobile phones.  If they are not typing or moving the cursor they’re watching movies.

     Not everyone has time for movies.  You might have 20 minutes of alone time on the way to a museum, club or ballgame. You’re LOLed out and don’t want to bother someone with another inane cell phone conversation starting out with “Hey. What are you doing?”  The answer?  Log on and find some video programming. It will start out as a single curated channel called Mo-Tube or something, containing short length “mobi-sodes” of 16-22 minutes in duration. After a while there will be more channels and programming segments, but it will start with a single new branded channel. Not necessarily serial in nature, these mobi-sodes will be designed to load and stream efficiently and, I’m guessing will be available via subscription.   Aol, you feel me?

    New Type of Programming.

    This will be a new type of programming – not radio, not TV, not movies.  Just little chunks of original and mashed-up programming that stimulate the viewer, fill some time and get the brain moving. Mobi-sodes. Coming to a device near you…in three years or less.

     PS. I know someone will say the channel exists already, but if a tree falls in a the woods and no one is around….

    The Diffusion of Advertising

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    Advertising ain’t what is used to was (a little Southernism I made up). Creation of big selling ideas by highly paid creatives and marketing people, broadcast to millions via TV, radio and print was the ad business.  Today, thanks to technology, the ad business is undergoing a diffusion like never before. Digital agencies, though not yet offered a seat at the big table, are new and important players.  Google is the most profitable advertising agency in the world and Facebook is hot on their trail.  And when I say “mobile advertising” does any one company come to mind?  That one is going to be huge…but it’s still to play out.

    Buy or Build?

    Big traditional ad agencies clearly see the need to offer digital, social and mobile but are asking themselves “Do we buy or build?” Right now they’re doing both: hiring someone smart in each discipline and using them to select cottage industry players who are truly immersed.  Better than last year, which was all “Go out and get me a subservient chicken.”  Or “Find me those nerds who built the US Weekly Facebook poll.”

    I’ve long thought that mid-size agencies were poised to win in this diffuse advertising world, but now I’m not so sure. True, they can more quickly parlay a powerful branding idea into a market-moving integrated campaign but the model may not be extensible.

    Bud Cadell is right when he says the old ad agency model is broken. It will take open minds, forward thinking, experience, software, an understanding of brand building, and lots of money to fix the process. I’m of the mind that the successful model is more likely to come out of MDC Partners than WPP.  It will be fun to watch though. Peace!

    Google and Mobile Apps

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    Google’s brand strategy used to be “organizing the world’s information” or putting the “world’s information one click away.”  Larry Page, seeing that his market share slipped 1.2% last year has decided to change that. He’s renamed the search division the knowledge division.  This, ironically, is the Microsoft Bing strategy – so eloquently presented in the “information overload” campaign developed by JWT a couple of years ago.  The difference between “information” and “knowledge” being that the latter takes you closer to a decision — closer to a sale.  This is a mistake.  The strategy did not move the market significantly for Bing and won’t for Google.  Google needs to stick to owning search and leave our brains to us.

    cave art

    What has disrupted search on the web is the smart phone. (See cover story in the NYT today for excellent piece on this.) Mobile phones are not built for full screen search, so app developers and VCs have set their sights on specialized, robust search and retrieve mobile experiences that remove the chaff and get us to information right away.  These apps, by specializing and using geo-location, trump Google and search on mobiles. They are hot — but proper monetization still isn’t happening. Ads on mobiles are still cave art.

    Let’s solve the mobile ad thing by 2015.  Any ideas?   Peace.

    The Real “Situation.”

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    Before SI meant Sports Illustrated it meant Situationist International, a European movement intended to create social change through loud, startling political events.  Anyone familiar with the punk movement knows Malcolm McLaren (RIP).  Mr. McLaren sired the Sex Pistols, practiced SI and was a huge music and cultural catalyst.  In the 50-70s the Situationists were angry and focused on political change. When Mr. McLaren introduced punk to the world and NYC in the 70s he was angry but he was a lot more.

    Just as Greenwich Village called to America’s gay and lesbian communities back in the day, punk placed a call to the country’s disaffected youth in search of their own Woodstock… and they came to downtown NYC in droves.  It was an interesting time, with lots of layered social texture. Mr. McLaren was a big part of this movement.

    Marketing Situation.

    A handful of marketing companies today attempt to acculturate products into our lives. Strawberry Frog, for one, is very vocal about creating “cultural movements.”  Experiential marketing companies such as Momentum look to jump-start change in new and unique product-centric ways thought events and promotions.  As the internet, mobile and geo-location grow in marketing stature we will begin to have more and more fun using these tools to drive sales — but let us remember Mr. McLaren: All tool and no movement can make for a soft, smarmy effort. Peace!

    Want Better Mobile Apps? Fun Up Your Calc.

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    Tired of hearing my self-deprecating “I’m a simple man” spiel?  Hey, it’s a living.  The latest simplified observation in the land of black and white has to do with mobile applications and Web apps. I’ve been selling selling for enough years to know some of the web’s first apps were online calculators.  “How much will your company save if you use our product?  Click the calculator?” Well, fifteen or so years later the premise still holds. Calcu-lay-sh is one of the two primary apps in mobile.  The other is plain, stupid fun.

    The big question is “Which app-set is bigger?”  Calculation apps or fun apps? (Search and geolocation are both caculations.) So what do you think marketers?  50/50?  70/30?  With the answer hanging in the air, I’ll suggest there just might be a gray area to consider – and that’s the fun calculation.  Shazam is one such — an app that listens to music and tells you the name of the song.

    Smart digital markets know that combining calc and fun is a way to reduce the barrier between a consumer and a product. But be careful here, there is a difference between fun and consumption. Knowing where the taco truck is not necessarily fun, not after the first time.  Fun up your calculation, make it add value to the brand and you’ll have yourself a winner. Simple. Peace.