mobile

The Big Idea of Technology Driven Advertising

Remember the days when you’re on vacation driving down the highway with billboards flashing in your face? Or ads interrupting your musical paradise as you drive away in your convertible? Some made you laugh, others you didn’t even notice.

For the most part those days are gone. The future of advertising has changed forever. It was only ten years ago when advertising was driven by media placements and campaigns. Then the dotcom era started along with YouTube, and it slowly became about creating a complimentary online campaign to a brand’s TV campaign. Now, it’s about experimenting with an abundance of apps and networks that a customer pulls out of their pocket.

The acceleration of innovative change since the smartphone has led to onslaught of new apps. Combine that with powerful social communication tools and our society has forever changed the way we communicate. Today, advertising is not just about creative; it’s become a creative tool for business operations. We believe advertising has become a technology driven creative service that provides brands the opportunity to increase the effectiveness and impact of creativity.

Technology is the vehicle that drives the creative and key message, but in most cases it doesn’t determine what app or network the brand should be on. Nor does it determine what the creative and key message is. For example, we focus on the client’s objectives to develop the big idea based on the insights produced in our research. The big idea always has to drive your creative, not the technology.

One company particularly, is demonstrating how the combination of social and mobile can be a very effective combination to enhance the delivery of a big idea.
American Express has been one of the most active businesses in 2011 partnering with both Foursquare and Facebook to offer integrated seamless deals. Realizing that Groupon could be a major threat to their business, American Express started with a big idea: “American Express takes what you ‘Like’ and gives what you love.”

With this idea in mind, American Express launched two integrated social and mobile initiatives. The most recent one is a new Facebook “Link, Like, Love” app that allows Amex cardholders to sync their card to their social graph. This provides customers with personalized deals based on brands they’ve liked on Facebook. What’s the best thing? The customer does not have to purchase the deal. It’s automatically synched to the cardholders account.

On Foursquare, American Express is doing something similar. Instead of personalized social deals, the customer receives mobile check-in credits applied to their accounts within a few days after they tap “load to card”. The point is, every channel and every medium offers different benefits, but successful campaigns are always designed with one thing in mind, a big idea.

Even the food trucks are finding success by focusing on key messages. For instance, several food trucks in this recent Mashable article have been successful in either:

• Celebrating major milestones
• Crowdsourcing recipes on Facebook
• Building awareness and excitement during dead times
• Offering deals
• Promoting relevant holidays with timely advertising via mobile

Mobile is here now. It’s the future. But it’s only a tool; it’s not an idea. Let us help you establish that big idea.

Tags: American Express, Amex, facebook, foursquare, mobile, Social Media

The Explosion of Hyper-Exclusive Mobile Communities

Now three months into 2011, it’s clear that the integration of mobile, social, and geo-location is about to take off in a big way. Companies looking to further grow their online communities and conversations amongst fans have never had so many options on different types of networks and devices. In the past six months, and especially during March at SXSW, two new mobile social community categories have dominated headlines:

• Photo-Sharing
• Group Messaging

Photo Sharing

More than ever, brands are starting to realize the benefit of generating content and not just text based. Over the past six months, the biggest trend in generating content is to ensure that your brand or company is striving for context and providing value. Mobile photo sharing on iPhone and Android has never been more popular amongst smart phone users than in the last six months. Brands have found a distinct advantage in becoming part of mobile photo-sharing networks because users have fewer issues over privacy on these networks than Facebook.

Mobile photo-sharing applications don’t ask for permission to gain access to sensitive personal information such as your name, phone number, address, date of birth, etc. Instead, users around the world are free to share photos amongst their friends and other network users while also choosing to see other cool photos from anyone they choose to follow. Consumers, specifically young adults, enjoy creating a community around interesting and fascinating pieces of art, in this case, photos. Brands that have experimented with photo sharing include, Levis Brazil, San Diego Chargers, Starbucks, NPR, Brisk Iced Tea, and many others.

Depending on your industry and company, brands are using the tools to give users a “behind-the-scenes” look at their events, meetings, product development, or other things and to share with their fans. Fans of mobile photo-sharing networks seem to be interested in sharing these photos as a “cool way” to socially connect with the community. Mobile apps to watch out for are:

• Instagram
• PicPlz
• Hipstamatic
• Color (New – Launched March 24th)

Group Messaging

The early micro-trend in 2011 is all about group messaging and the ability to create small networks of friends labeled as, for example, “Sport friends”, “Coffee Mates”, “Shopaholics”, etc. The idea that mobile apps could provide an organized, interesting, and relevant experience to keep track of micro-conversations amongst group of friends is very appealing. Brands think so too! Companies are starting to explore ways of how to use these platforms and developers are already trying to build brand incentives into their apps.

GroupMe launched “Featured Conversations” on March 28th that allows users to talk in groups of people about their favourite brands or companies (if they are featured). For instance, group conversations can happen around the Vancouver Canucks, Gap, Bon Jovi, Randy Jackson’s America’s Best Dance Crew, etc. This is just the beginning of this new category of mobile apps. Other companies that made a splash in this space at SXSW are:

• Beluga – Acquired by Facebook on March. 3rd
• Grouped{In} – Launched at SXSW 2011
• Google’s Disco – Launched March. 26th (USA only)
• Fast Society – USA only right now
• KIK

The future of online and mobile communities is growing significantly, but it will be interesting to see the choices companies make in the future.

Over the next two years, communities will blur or merge from larger online social networks (ie: Twitter and Facebook) to more hyper-local exclusive networks on mobile apps. Let the fun of mobile communities and user adoptions begin!

Tags: advertising, app, group messaging, mobile, photo-sharing

The Power in Our Hands

The internet is a powerful medium because it is not bound by time. You can find almost any information you want, when you want it.

Connect the internet to a mobile device (eg. smartphone) and its potential is greatly magnified. Now you can find almost any information you want, when you want it, where you want it.

This is the power of the mobile device. Mobile is becoming an increasingly important part of business and our lives.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted at the 2011 IAB Leadership Meeting, “mobile use is growing faster than allof Google’s internal predications”.

Add to that…

A recent IDC study concluded that about 1.5 million tablets will be purchased by Canadians by the end of 2011. As noted by Techvibes, this means roughly 1 out of every 23 Canadians will own a tablet by the end of 2011.

A survey by PopCap, a casual gaming company, found that over half of survey respondents said they had played a game on a mobile device at some point in their lives.

Games today. What tomorrow?

Successful business applications and marketing strategies that leverage mobile devices will help customers solve a problem by addressing what, when and where.

Do you have a business problem that can be solved with a mobile app?

Victor Chan

Tags: mobile, smartphone, statistics

Web Schmeb

With platforms such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck making it easy for social media junkies to update their status and manage multiple social media accounts, I wonder if this is changing the way we use the web?

More and more, I find myself accessing specific sites, and not surfing the web. Having the ability to log on to just one site and organize Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all at once meets my need for one-stop-shop convenience. With dozens of smart phone applications for Twitter alone, it appears that others like the idea as well. But do these sites change the overall Twitter experience?

Third party services provide a no-nonsense platform to push, and receive, tweets or status updates, as well as manage social media accounts (all done under the third party’s branded dashboard). The launch of the new Twitter site is evidence, perhaps, of a strategy by Twitter to regain control of their members’ experience – lure back those using third party services.

By driving users to twitter.com there is potential to re-discover, and fall in love with, the new feature-rich, modern platform, bringing Twitter users back to the mother site. This move has the potential to grow the Twitter community creating engaged, committed users and increasing retention rates.

As Twitter rolls out their new interface, I will definitely check it out. I am excited to try the fresh, cleaner platform, that reveals greater context in each tweet. I also want to take advantage of the option to embed media to further engage my followers with photos and videos.

Taylor

Tags: mobile, new Twitter, Social Media, user engagement, web

Strangers Chose What I Ate for Dinner

I was at a friend’s place last night watching some Olympic Hockey. Eventually the group of us got hungry and decided to order in some Chinese food. Problem: none of us knew of any good and/or nearby Chinese restaurants.

Within seconds, two iPhones came out. We ‘UrbanSpooned’ a place nearby and then hopped online to read more reviews of the food. Within 10 minutes we had 6 dishes chosen based on favourable reviews. Without even consulting the restaurant’s menu, we went ahead and ordered based solely on the opinions of strangers.

Dinner arrived. Every dish was a winner.

After that, some of us contributed our own reviews, and added the restaurant to our mobile contact lists.

The irony is, if this restaurant had a website, we wouldn’t have easily found it. Yet, there were multiple sources in which to find information about it and its dishes. The point here is if you don’t take control of your online strategy, others will.

Swap out this restaurant for any other kind of business – say an airline, or a financial institution and you can quickly see how joining the online conversation already happening about your brand or product is critical. The goal isn’t to stop people from talking about you. (Quite the opposite in fact.) The goal is to listen. Be a part of the conversation. And be responsive.

Think of it not as being in the driver’s seat, but as drawing the map people follow.

What’s your experience?

Erin

Tags: chinese food, iPhone, mobile, online reviews, online strategy, peer reviews, urbanspoon