Now that’s mobile advertising

Pretty much every client and agency I speak too wants new rich media formats on mobile. Never mind cost-effective ROI blah blah blah, get me something that is a bit like a TV ad.

Here to make your day is the new Prius iPad app – scribble on it with your finger and it makes little shapes that whiz past in the background.

Go on – enjoy – fill your boots!!

Location, Location

In February I wrote a 30k-word mobile futures piece for a client, and it’s intriguing to see many of my predictions coming true over time. We’ve seen Android overtake other smart OS faster than most predicted, a growth in mobile commerce, and now we appear to be about to see Facebook trample all over FourSquare as the location-based network of choice. Therefore it’s fair to say that anyone who has been testing FourSquare marketing techniques is about to be paid back in spades.

As a mobilist, the Location-Based Community is a technology wet dream – with pretty much everything the smartphone is capable of all working together in one application and experience, as in my diagram below. Now that some consumer scale is about to be applied to it, we’re really going to see what it can do.

What's in a Location-Based Community?

Mobile steals half the pizza

Mobile is really showing itself as the king channel for convenience purchasing – Pizza Hut have let slip that over half of their sales now come from mobiles.

Boom times for Mobile Commerce

According to yet more new research, 41% of retailers plan to have a mobile comerce offering either via mobile web or app within 12 months. Quite apart from the dizzying revenues that can be foreseen from those providers offering these kind of mobile services to retailers, it shows how easy it is for brands to fall behind the curve of consumer behaviour. Most brands are ony just waking up to the dawn of social media, and now with mobile laid over it – how will they cope?

Domino’s take a pizza the mobile social action….

While it may seem like some as an excuse for lazy puns, Domino’s Pizza’s annual results make for some ch-easy listening for shareholders. An excitable article from Marketing credits social media as a key driver for a 29% surge in pre-tax profits – and that’s serious dough.

The chain’s Foursquare efforts appear to be responsible for this mushrooming in sales, with the program, launched in May, named as a factor in the financial results, even though other digital channels now pepper Domino’s trading, with digital up to 32.7% of overall sales.

So what’s so great about Domino’s social capers? As illustrated, users who become mayor of a Domino’s outlet can benefit to the tuna of one free pizza per week. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you checking in each time you duck past an outlet on the way to the station or wherever, but that’s another article.However, despite the obvious flaws, the campaign is no turkey. Domino’s also benefited from a sponsorship of this year’s Britian’s Got Talent iPhone app, which contained banners and an embedded ordering facility.

So is Foursquare the nuts when it comes to local marketing, or is it just chewing on the crust of engagement that will only be driven by a big player like Facebook whenever they sort out their Geolocation product? Veal see…

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a next-gen intermediate convergence device or something…

A project manager walked into our office the other day proudly clutching a new enormous smartphone. And when I say big, I mean big. The Dell Streak, with its 5-inch screen, is far bigger than the average smartphone. Boasting a nice implementation of the Android OS and all the usual features associated with a top smartphone, it’s a great phone.

However, there are any number of questions raised by its release. Firstly, is it acceptable in polite society to point and laugh at people carrying outsize Dom-Joly-esque mobile phones? But perhaps more importantly, what does this do for those faithfully deploying their content to the mobile web? As I see it, you may now have to cater for the following screen sizes or versions when thinking about your web site:

• Basic low-end phones (eg Sony K800)
• Mid-range phones (eg Nokia N95)
• Smartphones (eg iPhone)
• Outsize smartphones (eg the Streak)
• iPad (yep – they still don’t do Flash!)
• Tablet (same size as iPad but with Flash)
• Web (I believe some old-fashioned users still use PCs to access the web)
• Google TV (content may need to be stretched into large format rather than the compression we are used to with mobile!)

It may seem like a pain to have to adapt your content for all these diversifying browsers, but if you take it as a given that you have to take your brand to consumers and their preferred channels, then this is a step you have to take, particularly if your site is sales-driven.

More new screens may pop-up along the way, but I think that the key tasks for any brand are:

• Health-check your site or content on mobile devices – you probably have around 3-4% of your traffic coming from mobiles already
• Ensure your back-end data is ready for syndication to a variety of new platforms
• Get in first – most of your competitors are still not effectively engaging with new channels, so you can steal a march

What’s all the fuss 4?

So with the release of a new iPhone comes a wealth of new features, rounds of sycophantic applause from Apple fanboys the world over, and continued beatification of Steve Jobs as the new Messiah.

I love my iPhone, I really do, but is the new version really going to change the world, or is it really just a point release with no huge revoution afoot?

Let’s look at the basics. The iphone 4 will feature:

• an all-new metal body that doubles as the radio antenna – this might mean that iPhone users experience fewer dropped calls!
• an all-new display display making it the clearest picture in the mobile market, and twice as many pixels as any previous model
• front-facing camera, to allow video calling over wi-fi and an LED flash for the rear camera (to bring it in line with standards set by… erm… the Nokia N70 in 2005!)
• iBooks!
• an iPad-style A4 processor that will offer increased battery life
• a new 3-axis gyroscope instead of the standard accelerometer, meaning no more crashing during driving games

So what does any of this mean for mobile marketing? Well, apart from needing to write another version of all your apps for the new screen resolution, possibly not that much. What it will certainly do is continue to hold iPhone’s place as the leading integrated smartphone, so anyone defining a mobile strategy will have to continue to pay it attention, despite Android’s ongoing ascent.

With iPhone continuing to raise the bar for smartphone features and usability, and Android handsets such as the new Desire and Evo racing after it, the use of mobile for content, advertising, branding and fun is set to go on unabated.

There are a couple of interesting questions that Apple will have to find the answers to though:

• With iPhone 4 taking its place at the top of the smartphone tree – will they continue to make the 3GS and lower models – possibly even dropping the price of entry to broaden out the demographic beyind its current elite? This would make it an even more irresistable, and justifiable, platform for marketers, and help prevent Android or even Nokia’s Symbian from taking a huge chunk of the mass market
• There will be disappointment at the lack of an NFC chip in the device, and this will slow the development of mobile payment and the efforts of the banks to really deploy to mobile. How will they keep up with other manufacturers who will fly ahead with a range of NFC solutions such as micro SD?

The real Pay-Phone

For anyone looking for the latest in mobile device wizardry, Mobilecrunch is a good place to go. They’re always first to get their hands on the latest gadget, and this is no exception. Visa have released their iPhone sleeve to enable contactless payment at any contactless retailer. Or as they pithily put it, “Pop on the case, plug in the microSD card, download the payment app from the App Store — and bam, you’re buying stuff at PetCo like someone from the future and/or Japan.”

Wave it and pay, like someone from the future...

Going too far in mobile

I’m all for creating an engaging brand experience through mobile, but if there exists a notion of ‘taking it too far’ then I would venture that the line has been crossed by Puma. The new Puma Phone takes a whole range of sports-related content and places it on a branded device. There are branded DJ decks, branded compass, branded MMS message templates built in, acess to branded social channels and much more branding. In fact, the branding is so bold, so brash, and so frankly RED that it makes your eyes hurt.

And this is my problem with this kind of takeover – at the end of the day, the phone does not belog to the brand, it belongs to the user. I can’t think that even the most fanatical brand adherent would want their most personal device subject to this kind of brandwash, and if they do initially, the novelty will swiftly wear off…

iPhone offers a boost to Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is often seen as little more than a gimmick for high-end smartphone users. But the notion of enhancing the real word with digital markers is gaining ground. Firstly the Layar AR browser is being pre-installed on a large number of handsets from Samsung, and the manufacturer is open about its enthusiasm for augemented reaity gaming and experience. And secondly, the upcoming iPhone 4.0 release will allow developers to make great strides forward. The reason is that app developers can now interrogate the video feed to place content dynamically into the video view.

This enables all sorts of new options: game developers can place items or animations that interact with their surroundings – for example, virtual characters can peer round doors, climb buildings etc. And in the realm of code scanning, users can hold their phone over the new generation of QR codes to launch experiences, rather than having to take a picture.

So be prepared for AR browsing, games and content discovery to be a significant part of mobile moving forwards as handset advance.