The Mobile World – In 60 Seconds
November 3rd, 2011
Archive
Archive for the ‘Mobile Marketing’ Category
Keynoting OMMA Mobile
October 26th, 2011
Shameless plug for my keynote this past Tuesday (10.25.11) @ the OMMA Mobile Conference in San Francisco.
McDonalds Super Sizes The Game Of Pong
June 6th, 2011
In a brilliant marriage between Out of Home advertising (Video Boards) and your Smart Phone, McDonald’s has managed to come up with an engaging new twist on an arcade classic – Pong – Golden Arches style. Well played Ronald…
The Mobile Movement – Stat Porn, Courtesy Of Google
April 28th, 2011
There are actually some pretty interesting stats embedded within. Particularly compelling is the marriage of retail and your mobile device:
Purchase-driven Shoppers: Smartphones have become an indispensable shopping tool and are used across channels and throughout the research and decision-making process.
- 79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices, finding more product info to locating a retailer
- 74% of smartphone shoppers make a purchase, whether online, in-store, or on their phones
- 70% use their smartphones while in the store, reflecting varied purchase paths that often begin online or on their phones and brings consumers to the store
Courtesy: Google Mobile Ads Blog
100 Things To Watch In 2011
January 4th, 2011
Every year, JWT releases a deck covering ‘What To Watch’ in the coming year. The last several years, they’ve made some very accurate predictions. Looking into 2011, I’m pleased to see that they’ve called out Mobile as the ‘Everything Hub’. That is spot on in my opinion. Full forecast embedded below.
Mobile Year in Review: 2010
December 13th, 2010
Mobile Future releases their over the shoulder ‘look back’ at the year that proved to be (finally) the legitimate ‘Year of Mobile’.
Starbucks Just ‘Gets’ Mobile
November 19th, 2010
Freshly named Mobile Marketer’s ‘2010 Mobile Marketer Of The Year‘ – Starbucks continues to make the right moves, on the right platforms, with the right people – their customers. I’ve written about Starbucks multiple times on this site in the last couple of years, giving them loads of credit for the way that they effectively market their brand while keeping in mind that their main role is how to best service their customers.
The thing that impresses me most about Starbucks is their willingness to ‘try’ things. They have developed a culture of innovation surrounding how they market to, and embrace their customers. A key quote from the Mobile Marketer article inspired the title of this post:
“Starbucks taps mobile for the medium’s strengths: location, timeliness and immediacy, convenience and measurability,”
5 words – 4 important to the customer, 1 very important to Starbucks (measurability).
They are clearly customer centric, with the aim to 1) Make it easy on their customer to do business with them 2) Make the experience relevant and, most importantly 3) Build an intense level of loyalty with their patrons.
What better way to accomplish those things listed above than to create a set of tools that are with you all the time, on the computing device you use most often? Your phone. This device provides an opportunity for Starbucks to interact with their patrons multiple times a day, providing them an enhanced experience with a product they clearly love, and (this is important to a marketer) get real time data about those people and how they interact with your brand in a non-intrusive and invisible fashion. People are willingly interacting with Starbucks because they are getting perceived value from their experience on their mobile device. Well done, Starbucks – you’ve set the bar.
Weekly Wrap Up – 10.1.10
October 1st, 2010
My top 10 reads for the week. This is a SMALL sampling of what I come across in my weekly media consumption addiction. If you’d like to be on my email list, please email me and I will add you.
Foursquare Takes The Next Step In Working With Brands – ReadWriteWeb
Gifi Lets You Hide Money for Your Friends to Encourage Foursquare Check-Ins – NYTimes
Facebook Sees Social Commerce Reaching Tipping Point – WSJ
AOL’s Tim Armstrong: We Got TechCrunch! – TechCrunch
How Important Have Apps Become? – FloTown Infograph
Barcode Scanning Up 700% This Year – MediaPost
Facebook and Skype Readying Deep Integration Partnership – AllThingsD
Google betting BIG on Mobile for future revenue – Business 2.0 Press
Why Chipotle Ditched Ad Agencies – AdAge
The Value of a Liker – Facebook
Digital Marketing, Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Social Media
The Future Of TV – In The Palm Of Your Hand
September 7th, 2010
We’re seeing more and more instances of ‘TV on the go’ – everything from streaming your NetFlix queue through your mobile device, to downloading your favorite TV shows through iTunes (which just got a LOT cheaper) to live TV via dedicated devices. Flo TV is one of the first to come through on the last example, but also has the cross over to your smart phone as well. With the opening of College Football season this weekend, they made a large commercial push through Saturday’s games. I’m biased, but I thought this was a great ad. Go Ducks!
Tagging The World
August 17th, 2010
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the connection between my digital world and the physical world. I spend a lot of time in both (with my job being the forcing function for the former) and have often wondered how much cross over there really is in terms of the activities that are being done. What has risen to the surface for me lately is the notion of ‘tagging’. Think of it in terms of Facebook. I take thousands of photos every year – of places, people, events, objects, animals, and simple moments in time that I want to capture. When I post those photos – either to my Facebook account or my Flickr account, I am usually pretty diligent about ‘tagging’ the important objects (human or non human) that are present in each photo. That creates a digital, track-able, trail that can be shared with those that I feel would like to participate in the experience. Our social networking personas are full of ‘tagged’ content. From a simple statement on Twitter to a photo on Facebook to a mention in a blog post.
The thing that I am finding fascinating lately is the rise in the tendency to tag our physical world. Take the application Stickybits for example. The proclamation on their website is as follows:
“A fun and social way to attach digital content to real world objects”
How does it work? You simply use your smart phone with the Stickybits app on it to scan a bar code on any physical object that might have one (soda can, magazine, packaging of your favorite DVD – you get the point – they’re everywhere and anywhere) and then attach whatever ‘tag’ you would like to that bar code. The tag could contain a link to a document, sound file, photo, video, or just be simply a comment on the product containing the bar code itself. Why do this you ask? To enhance and expand upon the tangible offering of any physical object in your everyday world. For example, rather than simply handing over your business card with your standard information on it – why not affix a scan-able bar code to it that provides your business acquaintance the ability to download your resume or any other file you want to share – simply by scanning your business card? A brilliant way to make an impression beyond a 1″x3″ piece of card stock.
This new wave of real world ‘tagging’ is essentially a digital form of graffiti on physical objects. Let’s see how it might work. Today I scanned the bar code on the back of my badge for work. Having done that and uploaded it to my Stickybits account, any friend that I have associated with that account will be able to see what I’ve scanned and add their own tag or comment to that object. So this picture could easily be modified with a comment, additional photo, or incriminating video….if I’ve made it public to my friends. I’ll be careful with whom I allow to see my scans. :-)
Stickybits is not the only game in town. Tales of Things is doing something similar and there is a cadre of others hunting down the same path. Is this new? Actually, no – Wired published a story 6 years ago on the possibilities of linking your world to the Web – but the activity did not gain full momentum until the adoption of Smart Phones over the last 18 months. Per Wired
“Technologists have long dreamed of a clickable world, where machine-readable tags link physical objects to the universe of information on the Web“.
It’s taken a long time for this activity to gain significant momentum with the natural correlation between Mobile and Social Media, I expect this to ramp exponentially moving forward.
