The mobile agency conundrum

A journalist called me the other day as he was writing a piece on whether brands are better off using their existing agency set-up to deliver mobile services, or to use the services of a mobile specialist instead. While I would have an obvious natural bias towards the specialists, having been in that field for nearly 10 years now, it’s not an open-and-shut case.

The argument for the specialists goes as follows:

• - Without a thorough grounding in the minutiae of concepting, specifying, and delivering mobile campaigns, there is a wealth of detail that the traditional agency will not be aware of, or know how to communicate to a client. Equally there are issues, such as data charging, which are well-known and acknowledged in the mobile arena but which can cause unnecessary alarm to those not familiar with them.
• - While a traditional agency may find a Head of Mobile or similar to ‘do mobile’ at the agency, this provides some severe limitations in what they can achieve. Firstly there is only so much knowledge and experience that one or two people can carry around, particularly when mobile delivery has expanded to include ad-response, apps, media, experiential, mobile web and so on. With the way mobile changes so rapidly, it needs a whole business to stay on top of all these developments.
• - Clients should also work with mobile specialists direct because so many great mobile ideas are ‘lost in translation’ while being transitioned from the specialist to the client via an agency. I’ve often seen a detailed and compelling case for mobile reduced to one slide at the end of a presentation, just after the plans for branded squeezy stress balls and baseball caps. In these budget-cutting times mobile is still lamentably the ‘first thing to go’ despite providing measurable value, through a simple lack of understanding.
• - And people are a problem. Good people in mobile are like needles in a haystack, and you can probably count the number of really good broad-based mobile strategists in London on the fingers of two hands. Any Head of Mobile should have a minimum 5 years experience in mobile, and while the average traditional agency might just have one, a quick look around the MIG office shows no less than 30 people who qualify.

On the other hand though, there are great arguments for embedding mobile know-how in the mainstream agencies:

• - Mobile ideas need to sit at the top table along with all the other aspects of creative and go-to-market strategy. A mobile guru who can shout loud enough, stay on top of current market trends, and deliver effectively has the chance to implement the benefits of mobile really well. Without integration and planning, the mobile channel will never reach its full potential.
• - Most mobile specialists, with their background in technology, do not have the capabilities in creative and strategic thinking that their mainstream rivals have. While a few have truly bridged this gap, a mobile idea that falls out of the ad-planning thought process is likely to sit better within the comms plan and chime with the overall creative.

The best solution to my mind is to find a mobile agency with both a hardcore tech understanding AND a creative and strategic bent, and get them around the table with the other agencies working for the client. There’s no need for other agencies to worry too much about the new interloper: after all I’m not going to pretend to know how to plan for TV or write copy, but a helpful mobile agency will take both of these and more, and help them stretch a little bit further into the smallest screen.

MyO2 leads the way

There’s nothing more distracting than a new baby for taking your eye off the ball, hence no posts for over a month.

However, things move on apace in the world of mobile apps. Perhaps the biggest mover has been O2, whose myO2 app has finally been released to the App Store, meaning the getting on for 2 million UK iPhone users can now manage their accounts efficiently. While I have to declare an interest as we at MIG did the design and build, I have to admire its nice design and simple interface. Now that O2 have a really firm foothold in the App Store, it will be interesting to see how they go on to develop this: with such a raft of content and sponsorship opportunities just crying out for an iPhone execution, and the brand looking as good as ever, I would hope to see some updates to the app very soon.

While O2 have taken the end of their exclusivity period with good grace (and none-too-subtle references to the new smartphones they have coming out for Christmas) the news that Orange and Voda are stocking iPhone imminently is great news for all of us working in mobile. The relatively small number of iPhones in circulation in the UK has not stopped a number of brands jumping in to the App space, but with Orange’s move, and the merger with Tmobile underway, almost all of the UK will be able to take up the device without moving operators, and hopefully the increased competition will do something about the price as well.

All of this is timely as the race for smartphone supremacy hots up in the race for Christmas – with over 60% of all phones being sold in December. O2 will market their new Samsung Android phone aggressively, as well as the new Palm Pre which seems to have been an age in crossing the Atlantic. Maybe I just can’t shake off an old prejudice about Palms being nasty and rather pointless black and white devices from the 90s, but I can’t see Palm being able to take a significant market share with their device against the fast-growing Android.

But either way, this Christmas will provide an interesting yardstick for how the device market will map out, and for brands wanting to get decent coverage for their content across the mobile world, what they will have to do and how much it will cost them!

Freemium rate...

A part of our business at MIG is in the area of Premium Rate SMS - you know - the kind of stuff you see day in, day out on TV - "Text us your answer" and the user pays £1 to enter the competition. The scale of this type of messaging in the UK is monumental, and it's often this, and people's misunderstanding of it, that creates some concern about running mobile activity.

However, the flexible charging that is possible in SMS gives rise to an equal number of opportunities for marketers. One of these is the notion of FREE SMS messaging. This isn't the same as ‘standard rate' where the user pays their regular charge (10-12p on average) for each message sent to a shortcode, but is in fact 100% free to users, thus enabling them to take part in longer or more detailed interactions that can prove beneficial for the user in terms of requesting info, playing a game or whatever, and for the brand, who can extract more data and convey more rewards to the user without worrying about them draining their credit.

Of course this is particularly useful in the public sector and youth marketing. NHS Choices' mobile services (try it - text DOCTOR to 64746 - it's free!) use it throughout to enable free access to a raft of health care providers. Likewise Directov make accessing their WAP portal via SMS free as well. The 0p-rated shortcode is therefore seen naturally as a tool to engage lower demographics who are more cash-conscious and perhaps not such natural web-users.

But one of the biggest areas of profit for a marketer is in survey work. A survey is clearly a sensible measure to assess measures such as brand recall, perception etc. Having run a number of these surveys over the years, I never fail to be astonished by the responsiveness of the mobile audience, and by the enjoyment that certain demographics display in interacting with you.

If you send a text to a list of mobile numbers who have previously taken part in your promotion, whether it's a text-and-win, free sample or whatever, you will generally get around a 30% response rate, and of these, I have seen over 80% go on to answer 10 questions or more.

People love to chat by text. And this goes equally for brands. One of the most rewarding parts of mobile surveys is seeing how users tell you loads of things you don't ask for, in unprompted questions. For example, in a recent survey for an FMCG product, as well as the regular stuff around age, gender, location, consumption and media habits etc, we found countless people who wanted to suggest new flavours, many who wanted to just tell the brand how much they love the product, and even more who wanted to tell us how much a part of their family life it is.

Of course, you can get some of this from very small user bases in closed research suites, but for a really large user base of people opening up to you from the comfort of their living room, mobile is a powerful tool to consider.

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Oh, the Futility!

While going over a mobile application brief from a prospective client the other day with a technical designer, we were assessing the feasibility of the job on both iPhone and standard java phones. Unfortunately many of the features required just aren’t possible on one or both of the platforms. After stripping out all the unworkable elements we were left with a proposition that delivered much less than originally envisaged.

“If we deliver this, it’s an act of futility,” wailed the project manager. “Yes”, I replied instinctively, “but it’s an act of branded futility”.

This brings up the whole motivation for creating mobile apps and other content, and is a regular riff in iPhone seminars and training that I run. Like all brand activity, some is there to provide you with a “Wow”, a “How cool is that?” or simply the reassurance that if a company can afford to splurge millions on this TV creative, then their products must be at least ‘OK’. Then on the other hand there’s the more difficult and involved process of delivering something useful but that has a still tangible brand benefit beyond being a simple service enabler.

In the ‘useful’ category, apps are few in number but can be very high in quality and, erm, usefulness. Take BA’s iPhone app, a remarkably simple execution that gives you flight times and updates. It’s look-and-feel is pretty primitive but it certainly does the job. On a pure sales front, how about Oasis Fashion app – a clean and clear shop front of their latest looks. It does a brilliant job of showcasing the new gear and enticing you to add it to your bag. What a shame that when you come to purchase it routes you through to a non-iPhone rendered web site to purchase…

On the other hand, we have our throw-away apps there to create a 30-second frisson of novelty in the style of the now-textbook iPint. I constantly argue against those who deem these apps a ‘waste of time’. No one bats an eye at spending £2m on some TV creative, it just has to make ‘sense’ creatively.

Cobra’s iBanter has a range of jokes told full-screen by some comedy mouths, the gag being that you hold the iPhone over your face and hey presto, you become a side-splitting comedian. My guess is that this may not be used frequently in the real world.

Getting it more or less right is Reebok’s trainer-customising Your Reebok, which does a neat job of customizing your shoe and enabling purchase, although the sheer weight of the app means inordinate load times and a very hefty app download. Also the app requires completion of payment online – why not do the whole thing on the iPhone?

My favourite though, which goes one better, is Lastminute’s Fone Food app. As well as showing the restaurants in your area, it will also tell you precisely which have special offers on that minute. Not only is it a better food finder than the ubiquitous Urban Spoon, but it embodies that most Lastminute-y of brand values - the up-to-date inside line on what’s going on right now.

Whichever approach you take, I believe there is a further case for apps, which lies in what I call the buttonisation of the mobile. The user, through an effective promotion, a snappy name, or whatever, has been persuaded to take a piece of branded content or entertainment on to their phone. Since my days as a junior mobile creative creating monochrome wallpapers on to Nokia devices pixel by pixel, I've been a great believer in personalising phones, and even now on effective WAP sites like Rimmel's new effort (link, pic) it's still successful. Now though I think that with the added form, function and fun that apps bring, the placement of brands on mobile devices is more powerful and meaningful then ever.

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Home Office Beatz Knife Crime - with mobile...

While this blog, as with pretty much anyone dealing in mobile apps, is likely to be diverted for much of the time by the wonder of the iPhone, it's well worth remembering that there is another 99% of the mobile market which is, frankly, non-iPhone.

So how do we address this market through mobile apps, and who out there is going to receive them?

These were questions facing the Home Office recently in their battle against the scourge of knife crime. The demographic is challenging for any marketer - 11-16 year-olds in deprived urban areas and therefore iPhone, with its high tariff, is clearly out of the question.

What the agencies involved (Saint, and MIG - my current abode for purposes of full disclosure) came up with, was Pocket Beatz, intended to be a music studio for your mobile. Loaded with cool samples, loops and synths, Pocket Beatz was built as a java application, and therefore able to be downloaded by the majority of mobile phones, including some low-end phones relevant to the demographic. Embedded in the application is the campaign message, and also links to the campaign's Bebo mobile page.

The app contains a viral feature that reads the user's phone book and enables the user to send it to all their friends in one go, this creating the possibility of multiplying the reach of the campaign's media.

But how do you reach this demographic with a mobile application? This youth audience are not heavy users of mobile operator portals, but there are opportunities to reach them. Firstly, there are mobile versions of Bebo and MySpace with the right self-selecting demog, and it is also possible with some publishers to use handset targeting to ensure that only low-end handsets see the campaign's banners.

Then there is the potential to go route-one with your application, via networks of Bluetooth units in buses, cinemas, football stadia etc around the country. These can be bought on a cost-per-download and thus represent very good, and accountable, value. And as they can be bought on a location-by-location basis, you can tie in your distribution with where you hope your audience will be, in this case national Knife Crime hotspots.

So, while the other mobile players, who have been left behind by Apple in the application arms race, are trying to catch up - RIM (Blackberry), O2, Vodafone, Nokia, Google and so on - there still remains good mileage in taking a piece of creative, making it mobile, and getting it out to the right people.

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Tim Dunn is the head of marketing services at Mobile Interactive Group.  Tim has been the architect of many successful marketing campaigns, helping brands and the public sector exploit the unique properties of mobile.   

Taking out the Trash

With spring apparently just around the corner, I have the sudden urge to sling out loads of all junk and make things shiny and fresh for the new season.

Of course I could spend hours going through the attic and taking old carpet squares, dried up paint and more to the tip, but a much easier form of spring-cleaning is going through my old apps from when the AppStore was just a novelty, and seeing what horrors have managed to survive on my phone since then.

Over time I have lovingly streamlined my phone so that I have one page of core iPhone functions, and my most cherished apps, then a page of stuff I use a lot myself or for demo purposes, another page of branded apps, and then 6 more pages of apps of highly questionable utility or quality.

Pinch Media's recent excellent study into app usage over time  shows that the vast majority of apps, even paid ones, are unused just 30 days after they're first downloaded, so of the 800 million or so that have been downloaded since the AppStore launched, there are an awful lot sat in people's recycle bins... In reality this is a process that millions of users go through every day and apps hit the dust based on a range of different criteria.

Anyway here goes:

Personal favourite keepers
My favourite apps are generally music ones, so the brilliant DigiDrummer, Bebot, iShred and IR-909 all keep their prize positions, as do top-selling racers Banjo Kazooie and Cro-Mag Rally. Then there are the totally useful ones: TubeDeluxe, Facebook, Twitterfon, Lastminute's FoneFood (better than UrbanSpoon!) and Vicinity.

Great brand apps I demo alot
Walkers Flavour Racing is a great app that integrates perfectly into a great overall campaign, and I also like both the VW Polo Challenge for its awesome graphics and the BMW Z4 app I wrote about last week. BA Flights is also a great example of a brand delivering a tool of real value to its customers.

Less good brand apps to get rid of
Coke's approach is to create small throwaway apps based on simple well-known ideas. However, their Magic Bottle (it's an 8-ball but with very unsatisfying answers) and Spin The Coke are just that - throwaway. That can also be said for the Recycle For London ‘Evil Bin' game. While the cheap'n'cheerful look and feel matches the light-hearted branding of the overall campaign, any game worth its salt should really have more than 2 minutes or so of gameplay before the novelty wears off. Still, at least I can feel good about recycling it... And finally I can get rid of the Audi A4 app, which with its impossible to control car, questionable design (a black car on a black background?) and rejection of most of the basic features of a driving experience, is a classic example of an iPhone project gone wrong.

Stuff I had to download for work...
I'm no fitness fanatic, but my phone is jammed full of health and fitness apps such as BMI calculator, iPosture, RunKeeper and, erm... FMC... Another client looking at the racier end of the market means I also have the oh-so-classy Bikini Blast, iWobble, and the disturbing iGirl...

Crazy sports apps to get rid of
Much is made of the iPhone's accelerometer, and in some cases - too much! SGN Golf and iBowl are hopelessly optimistic in trying to recreate the action of the sport, while Soccer Kick-off, Vegas Pool (you can win every time!) and the woeful Darts should really be on the Wii to succeed at all...

iPhone ‘classics' I just don't like
Tap Tap Revenge - it's such a hit that in the future albums may be released purely as Tap Tap updates, and Coldplay's bank-manager rock seems a perfect first target. Bubblewrap has surely passed its sell-by date, while I could never get JellyCar to stay the right way up, despite its awesome physics and perky soundtrack.

Movie apps for films I will never see
There's nothing particularly good or bad about the apps, but Fast&Furious, Aliens v Monsters and The Unborn clearly have a limited lifespan, especially as international movie houses seem to be filling their apps with ‘Buy Tickets Now' links that only work in the US... Surely it isn't so difficult to remove these links for overseas users?

Quite apart from these I have shed another two pages of apps in total. I hope this shows a couple of things:

-          With over 25,000 apps in the store there is a lot of competition, but a lot of it is rubbish, so focus on quality

-          The dream is to provide something so cool or useful that it will live on users devices indefinitely

-          Failing that, there's still a lot of benefit in providing an app with just a few minutes of pleasure. This still applies to TV creative so why not digital?

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Coming up soon on Beyond SMS: What's the Media play for the AppStore, and a look at the COI's recent application to combat Knife Crime.

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It’s Art, but do we like it?

We all have preferences in art, and one man's Picasso is another man's Tracy Emin, so it's nice that BMW went out on a limb to make art the focus of their recent campaign for the Z4. For those too idle to click the link, it features the boy-racer-mobile driving around a large blank canvas depositing paints of different hues from its wheels to create an auto-matic masterpiece.

But while the TV ad is disappointingly coy in not revealing a full view of the masterpiece, the iPhone app (search for Z4 in iTunes) gives you the final result. After viewing a tantalizing clip of the live car in action, you get to drive the paint-wagon yourself, and the results are captured as a picture for you to save to your phone and... well whatever you want to do with that image. I'm quite pleased with mine - maybe all those handbrake turns are paying off.

The app is brimming with features, and very little seems to have been overlooked, from the various soundtrack choices (all ambient urban-cool thank you...) and a tutorial mode, to driving sensitivity adjustment and the little inspirational statements that appear on loading screens. Aside from the main art-driving conceit, there's also a full car customizing section, which also allows you to save your personalized hotrod as an image and also reuse the car next time you play.

On the other hand, another auto release still riding high is the app for the Mercedes C63 AMG. While the car itself might been an animal on Top Gear, the app competition is quite different. A grey exterior leads to some uber-cheesy US-voiced video clips, some really dull photos, and the chance to listen to the unmuted roar of the C63's engine. As the eco-driver of a Honda Jazz it's hard to comment on the engine, but any car heard through speaker of an iPhone is certainly a little underwhelming - the engine rev is not dissimilar to the lion from my daughter's favourite AudioZoo. The dealer locator works well - especially as I'm constantly amazed they bothered to bring StreetView all the way out to Watford. When iPhone 3.0 is released in the summer we'll be able to embed the Google Maps inside the app rather than having to click out, which curtails the experience somewhat.

What we're really seeing here is two different approaches to iPhone - BMW have provided a truly integrated approach to the rest of the creative, and done a great job technically, while the Merc effort is much more of an exercise in box-ticking, and probably a cheap one at that.

The funny thing is that both apps have been very successful in terms of number of downloads: the Z4 broke the top 10 chart of free apps, and the Mercedes is still in the top 20 Lifestyle apps; and this really shows how the use of apps is similar to any other advertising endeavour. Class may win you awards and tip the top end of consumers into being your fanboys, but for a large swathe of the market, it's still the iPhone medium, not the message, that counts.

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Next week - clearing out your iPhone of old junk apps - what horrors await?

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Welcome to Beyond SMS!

So - welcome to Revolution's new mobile apps blog! Here, I'll be looking at the good, the bad and the downright weird on iPhone, Android, java, Blackberry, and the myriad of other technologies springing up, as well as the new app stores being launched by all and sundry.

As anyone who's been in mobile for as long as I have (9 years and counting...) the fact that there are now not one but two mobile blogs in Revolution surely means that this is the long-heralded but often-delayed ‘year of mobile'? Right?

Right!! Judging by the number of mainstream clients and agencies now calling about iPhone apps, this could be it, and there's considerable knock-on effect for other forms of mobile marketing, such as WAP, java and plain old SMS too.

But while all mobile people love the iPhone, last Monday, when Apple announced the new features which will go into iPhone v3 software, was really special. Despite the fact it won't be here until summer, I saw a number of my colleagues moved to Twitter or blog their heartfelt love for the iPhone in terms that should probably worry their partners...

iPhone users have always had a love/hate relationship with the phone, but 3.0 will mean giant steps forwards for developers, brands, and humble day-to-day users.

For anyone who hasn't seen the new features yet, get yourselves ready for:

-          Cut+paste - yep, just like any other device, even horrid Windows Mobile, you will now be able to manipulate text in a semi-intelligent manner

-          MMS - although still one of the most expensive forms of data on the planet (25p for 100k of data anyone?) MMS has finally made it in, although most iPhone users are perfectly happy with just sending pics via e-mail

-          Bluetooth accessories - will now be able to connect with external hardware - imagine jogging while listening to your phone's iPod, while an app counts your heartbeats per minute via a Bluetooth monitor...

-          Bluetooth peer-to-peer - imagine all the great games being made for iPhone suddenly being multiplayer

-          Embed maps, streaming video and audio into applications. This means you don't have to click out of your app into Google maps to find nearest stores etc

And there's plenty more - in fact Apple have released over 1000 new widgets for us to build apps with, making them bigger and better brand tools than ever.

On one hand, this can be frustrating. Already I've been to one client to explain that the designs and concepts we've been working on for a couple of months now are all out of date as we can now do much more. But on the other hand, we can only applaud the way that Apple continuously listen to their users and improve their device. Sure, as this bingo-card from Mobile Crunch illustrates, you can't keep all the people happy all the time, but with a huge range of new creative possibilities coming up this summer, and doubtless more to follow, we're set for a lot more fun to follow.

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Tim Dunn is the head of marketing services at Mobile Interactive Group.  Tim has been the architect of many successful marketing campaigns, helping brands and the public sector exploit the unique properties of mobile.