MediaPost | Mobile Insider

Back To The Future: TV Is My New Radio

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:08:37 -0500

"Who is that, and what the hell is she wearing?" my daughter asked as the NBC Super Bowl pre-game show started with some country-like bleached blonde in silver lame pants singing the unctuous intro. I had a vague memory of this woman, but I was clueless. And this was only the first of countless times in the next few hours I couldn't ID someone who clearly the rest of the country knew as a celebrity.

Facebook Cites Mobile Expansion As 'Risk' To Its Future

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:14:00 -0500

Funny thing about the 425 million monthly users of Facebook on mobile devices: they don't monetize well, and Facebook itself admits it is unsure when and how they will. In all of the press attention to the size and overall prospects for Facebook's new public form, the elephant in the room that seemed to elude notice was sitting in every analyst's pocket. In fact, in yesterday's SEC filing for its proposed initial public offering, social network and mobile Goliath Facebook underscores the prospect that its massive popularity on devices could pose a business risk.

Local Mobile Marketers Use Real Money -- Their Own

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:18:00 -0500

At last week's Mobile Insider Summit in Key Largo, Fla., Yelp, Google Maps, and all the other usual suspects I consult for nearby resources were not going to be of much help here. We were in another world. The remote, painfully exclusive Ocean Reef Club wasn't the kind of place where you will find quick takeout, a 7-Eleven or a chain of any sort. No, if we wanted to hear directly from local merchants using mobile marketing, we were going to have to airlift them in. Which we did. For a superb panel on how real local businesses are using the medium, we had from Miami Mike Broder, a comics shop owner and President of the Florida SuperCon event, and Field Harrison, the owner of Dallas-based Mint Dentistry. Both Mike and Field were emphatic about something that many agencies may well forget about when activating the local channel: these small business owners are using their own personal funds to underwrite the marketing plan.

Can Self-Checkout Be Retailers' Secret Weapon?

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:53:00 -0500

The other day at Best Buy I encountered my first sighting of a mobilized tag-team couple. In the lead, the wife picked up cameras and accessories and recited the brands and model numbers, while the husband did mobile lookups on Amazon and barked out prices. These two had it down to an efficient science and a great division of labor. She was curating choices and he was acting as a kind of C3PO digital assistant.

'Numberlys': Fritz Lang Comes To Sesame Street

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:22:00 -0500

If the new "Numberlys" interactive story and game on the iPad looks and feels like a German Expressionist movie poster that somehow found its way onto "Sesame Street," you aren't far from the mark. In this follow-up to the hugely successful "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," the creators at Moonbot admit that Fritz Lang had more than a little to do with the monochrome modernist aesthetic. A series of drone-like bots in a world of numbers tries to build a new consciousness by discovering an alphabet. Mixing highly filmic sequences right out of Lang's "Metropolis" and straightforward game mechanics that help build each letter of the alphabet, Moonbot here excels at immersion.

The Golden Globes Melted Velveeta All Over My iPad

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:36:00 -0500

There was a lot of time to multitask during last Sunday's Golden Globes. Ricky Gervais was tepid at best, and generally unfunny at worst. The winners often seemed unaffected by the award themselves. And there was no apparent drunkenness. Unless a celebrity is embarrassing him or herself, or Gervais is doing it for them, I hardly see the point of this show. It was a good time to warm up the iPad and see what was on that screen.

The Rocky Road To Mobile Coupon Redemption

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:34:39 -0500

Mobile coupons are a no-brainer. Not having to clip, save and remember to carry print promotions is a convenience that should in theory supercharge the coupon format. But apparently it will take some brains to figure out how to execute on the promise.

Hi-Q: Sephora, Nordstrom, Macy's Top Prestige Mobile Rankings

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:29:18 -0500

'Tis the season to rate mobile competence. Digital think tank L2 says that Sephora, Nordstrom, Macy's and NET-A-Porter are the most "mobile-competent" among what it calls "prestige" brands. In L2's new study, Prestige 100 Mobile IQ, the most recognizable brands were measured across 250 parameters, including their mobile sites, apps, marketing approaches and innovation.

The Long And The Short Of Good-Enough Tablets

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:19:47 -0500

I have been playing with both the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet for the last month trying to work through why I have to force myself to use them. In weeks of carrying them around, I still find that their chief attribute is weight. In my everyday digital media routines I am most likely to use them as a relatively light ebook reader when lying in bed. In other words, for all their other functionality, their core use for me remains with each device's roots in the Nook and Kindle eReader platforms.

QR Eye For The Regular Guy

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:56:00 -0500

Mobile 2D codes are inevitably fascinating to marketers even as they remain relatively obscure to many consumers. In a recent study of consumer behavior and QR codes, cmb Consumer Pulse found that only 21% of over 1,200 consumer surveyed in October 2011 knew what the term "QR code" meant.

Using QR Codes At The 'Last Three Feet' Of Sale

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 02:36:33 -0500

Much like the Battle of Stalingrad, the mobile skirmishes for consumer attention at retail are likely to become tactical and granular. All of the usual in-store merchandising techniques get disrupted, from shelf arrangements to end cap positioning, salesmen pitches to signage. And what place do manufacturer/suppliers have in all of this now? Do they have better access to the consumer by cutting mobile merchandising deals with retailers in much the same way they might in a circular or in-store exposure? Should they be working with all of these third-party scan code and product-look-up solutions in order to insert themselves into the mobile research cycle? Or should an HP or a Sony invest in its own mobile content strategy to go straight to the consumer with mission-critical product info?

Have a Free Slice of M-Payments in Times Square This Weekend

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 10:46:47 -0500

Mobile payment systems, whether they be Web-based models like PayPal or full-bore NFC-powered approaches like Google Wallet or ISIS, may seem to consumers a solution in search of a problem. After all, paying with your phone is a neat trick, but ask yourself the hard question: were those stacks of credit cards in your wallet that m-payments replace really a choke point in the purchase process? My guess is that providers are a lot more anxious to get m-payments off the ground than are consumers. Enter the gimmicks designed to get people acquainted with m-payments.

Let TV Be TV: Fantasizing Apple's Next Move

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:13:00 -0500

"So this is what you are spending your time with after going to the gym?" my wife asks, as if I had just introduced her to my mistress. She had been wondering why my gym sojourns were suddenly taking longer than usual. Her spousal suspicions were raised. But knowing me, she understood that her "rival" surely was a gadget, not a woman. And truth be told, if the 70-inch Elite HDTV in Best Buy could have shrunk to the corner of the darkened home theater room that day, it would have crumpled its stunningly beautiful LED display into a ball and wept. My wife had met my paramour and was having none of it.

The Games That Mobile Santa Forgot

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:31:07 -0500

"So what are you playing lately?" I ask my daughter and her friends regularly. While I gave up the fruitless and misguided effort to be a cool dad eons ago, the one thing I do know about my daughter's generation is that video games are their signature art form. The fastest route through the adolescent wall of parental contempt is to talk zombie-massacre strategies in Left for Dead.

Return of the Grinch: The Mobile Naughty List

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:39:23 -0500

Now that I have gotten the niceness out of my system, we can turn to more serious and somber matters --- like what still sucks about mobile media and marketing. Oh, don't give me all that crap about "early days" and it will get better. We are over a decade and a half into the Web revolution and most ads here remain terrible. I find myself ticking off another year (about eight now) covering the mobile business, still waiting for some things to change.

The Mobile Nice List For 2011

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:46:04 -0500

It's that time of year again, when everyone in my family reminds me that "Your Christmas spirit sucks!" OK, so I am not the jolliest of elves. But I do have at least a few things to be jolly about after a year of innovation in mobile. Like Santa, I have been keeping a list of who has been naughty and nice. And as much as every molecule of my "two-sizes-too-small" heart yearns to hand out lumps of coal, the "nice" list is particularly full this year. This is not a "best of" or top ten. These are just the bits of mobile technology and content that keep the Grinch at bay.

Learning From iAds

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:38:38 -0500

Another round of hand-wringing over the value and effectiveness of Apple iAds begins today with an article in The Wall Street Journal reporting that Apple is "softening" its approach to brands and agencies about the format. WSJ says that after Apple's famously overpriced introduction of the format last year, the tepid response among many agencies has forced it to retreat on pricing, become more cooperative with buyers, and host the kinds of dog and pony shows of iAd attributes that all mere mortal media sellers have to do.

Learning From Snooki: The App Of Personality

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:15:46 -0500

"What are you doing with Snooki on your phone?" my daughter blurts at Thanksgiving as she peruses my iPhone deck. She knows full well that she can embarrass me in public just by reading off the apps on my phone. We used to aspire to having phones express our personalities in some focused presentational way via wallpapers and ringtones. But a limitless trove of apps has changed that dynamic and turned many people's phones into weird assemblages of their own taste, the range of their curiosities, and random acts of downloading.

Burning A Kindle On Both Ends

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:48:26 -0500

In addition to countless puns and plays on the product name, commentators have been coming up with all different ways of characterizing the Kindle Fire 7-inch entry into the tablet category (tablet on training wheels, et al). By all reports, Amazon's new mini-tablet will easily take second place in the tablet market by year's end. Whatever reservations analysts and reviewers have about the device, its flaws are outweighed by its incredible price.

The Circle Of Screens

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:43:06 -0500

"Are you messing with my 'Lion King' movie?" my daughter messages me through Facebook. She is about 20 miles away but is getting updates on my movie-watching via the wall postings. Apparently I "checked in" at Pride Rock and the Elephant Graveyard.

Stop Playing With The Router And Drive

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 10:31:00 -0500

It was about an hour into the four-hour Thanksgiving Eve drive home to family when it became clear Dad was on his way to yet another epic techno-fail. "Do you want me to drive?" my wife asked. "I'm just saying, I don't think you are supposed to be driving while adjusting a router. I can drive and you can play with the flashing thingie all you want." The ordinarily tedious Thanksgiving drive from northern Delaware to northern Jersey to visit both of our clans was supposed to be a grand experiment in mobile connectivity. Not graced with the latest in-car tech from Ford or BMW, I was seeing if we could cobble together the technology to craft a mobile hotspot that made it to our destination fully connected.

UltraViolet Lurches Toward All-Access Hollywood

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:56:47 -0500

"You bought the Harry Potter DVD? You don't even like Harry Potter," my wife reminds me -- because apparently I must have forgotten this fact? "Work," I say. In fact, no one in my family even wanted to watch again the underwhelming "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2" when I brought it home on Blu-ray. But I had to buy it. It was that or "Green Lantern." I had limited choices when I wanted to test the new UltraViolet system of giving movie disc buyers multiplatform access to its movies.

Google's Trojan App

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:38:28 -0500

Well, if the tablet users won't move from Apple to Android, then Google might as well bring its app suite to the iPad. The company issued a major rebuild of its core app for the iPad yesterday that could well challenge Apple and Safari's own control of the Web surfing experience on the device -- and more. From the basic search experience to site previewing and app integration, the new app is a serious play to capture the tablet mindshare Google seems unable to achieve on Android.

Branded Apps Need to Get Their 'Stories' Straight First

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 13:04:46 -0500

"Look, honey, I made you into a Heineken Christmas card." Actually, I'd used the company's new holiday app to plant a Halloween photo of my wife into the Heineken Star logo, so it was a ghoulish Christmas card. "Ew. What is the point?" "That's what I'm trying to figure out."

Warming Up The Old Mobile TV Tubes

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:56:06 -0500

Mobile storytelling may be catching on in my family. Well, I mean mobile stories by my daughter and wife that don't involve tales of my purported gadget zaniness and QR-snapping excesses. My wife still marvels at the fact that we sat one evening last winter in the living room watching the full first episode of "Saturday Night Live" (with George Carlin), which first ran during our respective teens years, on the iPhone.

Mobile Is the Web We Really Always Wanted All Along

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:07:00 -0500

One of the critical aspects of mobile media, especially tablet-based apps and sites, is their astounding levels of engagement. I will forever recall when Conde Nast's Director of Editorial Operations Rick Levine first shared with me the early stats on tablet magazine app usage months after the iPad first launched. I went back and asked him to confirm that indeed the time spent metrics for these early apps like GQ on iPad really were approaching the hour+-per-issue engagements the magazine industry historically had seen in print. They were true, he assured me and I was not the only one who was astonished.

Publishers Claim Mobile 'Confidence' -- But Don't Get Cocky, Kid

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:51:28 -0500

While you may not be able to tell by browsing major media brand URLs with your smart phone, 85% of newspapers, magazines and b2b publishers surveyed by the Audit Bureau of Circulation claim they have mobile content of some kind already deployed. The auditing organization for many of the top periodicals says in its new report that the publishing field is maturing rapidly in its adoption of mobile. That 85% of mobile-aware content providers is up from 76% last year, ABC says. I will chalk it up to the sample size (171), but media's mobile savvy is not quite as visible as these metrics suggest.

Content + Context + Cat Equals Applebee's QR Success

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:24:02 -0400

We finally found a QR code campaign my wife can get behind. Just add a cat. To get Mobile Insider newbies up to speed, my inarguably better half has become the nemesis of mobile 2D codes, because she has to play my wingman during my regular code hunts for meaningful campaigns. She watches my back as I block busy mall routes and appear to be a crazy person snapping cell phone pictures of random walls and signage. The cat that caught her eye this time is for what is hands down the most creative and effective use of mobile codes I have seen in recent months.

A QR Thing: Stuck In Macy's Backstage Door

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:08:55 -0400

"Don't break the Martha Stewart dishes," my wife yell-whispers as I reach across a display in Macy's, phone outstretched, waiting for the QR app to recognize the oh-so-distant code. "You're about to impale yourself on a wooden spoon," she warns. "They have the damned code printed so small and placed so far away, my phone needs a telephoto lens to grab it," I complain. "You're attracting attention," she notes. "I think I pulled something," I mention, figuring that tapping a note of sympathy might mollify her during another one of these embarrassing QR hunts. She is starting to cast apologetic looks at the salespeople who are gravitating toward us. Macy's was asking for it, however. The retailer keeps teasing us with some of the most ambitious mobile marketing pushes around.

Mobile Share Of Holiday Paid Search To Reach 17.3%, Requires Dedicated Buying Effort

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:05:22 -0400

Search and performance marketing agency Performics says that among its aggregate client base 14.2% of all Google search clicks come from mobile devices. Given the velocity of mobile growth and the patterns seen last year during the holiday gift searching season, the company is projecting that in December mobile paid search will account for 17.3% of all search clicks. The company also says that mobile search needs to be planned differently, by considering the multiple platforms on which people will see results.