11/20/09 by David Wachs | Blog, Marketing Blog | No Comments »
I just returned back from a trip to New York, where I had the opportunity to attend a benefit dinner for one of our clients, the Ad Council. Ad Council is celebrating its 56th year of delivering public service announcements; now many of which are coupled with web sites and integrated marketing campaigns. So far, we’ve been lucky enough to work on:
If you haven’t seen any of these campaigns (or others created by Ad Council), they’re worth a look; some of the best names in advertising–BBDO, DraftFCB, ArnoldNYC–have donated their time to create exceptional pieces, and we’re thrilled to be involved, if only slightly, in these causes.
In 2010, we hope to get more involved with this esteemed organization. While meeting with the Ad Council this week, we pledged our support to offer mobile marketing keywords to every single campaign, (and every single traditional media piece) developed by the organization, for no charge, indefinitely. We hope this allows the organization to continue to increase awareness of their campaigns. Even the simplest “save this information to my phone”, will help those standing at bus shelters, watching television commercials, or hearing radio ads remember to visit the Ad Council’s web sites when they get in front of their computer.
Congratulations to the Ad Council on another terrific year. And thank you to all the members of the advertising community that pledge their time, money, and ad inventory to make these campaigns successful, impactful, and (many times) a part of Americana.
11/19/09 by Cellit Staff | Blog, Marketing Blog | No Comments »
Mobile doesn’t work in a vacuum. As we talked about in the 3rd C – Commitment, without the aid of outside media, your mobile club will fall flat. It’s important to integrate mobile into your entire media plan, from broadcast television and radio spots, to print, billboard, email, newsletter and in-store. The more it just fits in, the more successful the club. So that begs the question: what is the right media message for mobile. Let me break it down into four points:
Have a clear call to action: Make it easy for the end user to understand what they need to do. Keep it simple and to the point. A short “TEXT BRIAN to 30364” will work wonders (and, if you actually do it, get you more information about me).Describe the benefit or reason for joining: The end user will want a reason to join the mobile club, and to understand the content they will receive upon joining. “… to receive coupons and alerts”, or “… to enter the contest”, or “… to get special offers via your phone” are all great examples of brief, succinct reasons to join.Visual and oral: Every medium has its own capabilities and restrictions – however, whenever possible, using both visual and oral will increase the impact. Broadcast television is the best for this, as it allows you to put text on the screen while the announcer provides audio reinforcement.Urgency: While not always applicable, urgency is great. Give the end user a reason to act now. Contests are great examples, while other clients have used the upcoming holiday deals or other timely season events to drive membership immediately.A good media message can be short and to the point, including all four of the points above. “Text BRIAN to 30364 before 2010 for killer ideas on how mobile can change your business!”
11/16/09 by David Wachs | Blog, Industry Blog | No Comments »
Hey everybody! It’s that time again! Time for another new-fangled phone operating system!
What’s that you say? You thought we had enough with the iPhone, Android, the Pre’s webOS, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile? Not so fast! There’s still room for more industry fragmentation! This time, Samsung, Korea’s leading manufacturer of dishwashers and air conditioners (oh, sure, they make TVs and phones too) is getting into the OS space. I can almost hear your collective nod of agreement. This is going to be good!
Bada, Samsung’s new OS (named for the Korean word for ‘ocean’) was released as:
“This new addition to Samsung’s mobile ecosystem enables developers to create applications for millions of new Samsung mobile phones, and consumers to enjoy a fun and diverse mobile experience.(emphasis added)”
An “open” platform for a closed device list. Unless your name’s Apple, I doubt the development community will come a’running.
So, what does this mean to you, the eager content provider? Should you look to unleash the next cool (first cool?) Bada app for the bada store? You gotta be the first! You gotta be the best! Bada me, baby!!
Don’t. Stop. Enough’s enough.
With the deluge of new operating systems flooding the phone market place today, what we’re ending up with is a huge distraction and expensive proposition for content developers and application developers. Developing an app for each new phone OS, to showcase the OS’s bells and whistles, becomes exceedingly expensive. With very little code sharing with other platforms, developing apps for each new platform is a constant struggle. You have two options, leverage a “middleware” cross-platform app development package, which will surely leave you with a set of mediocre, “least common denominator” apps, or spend a fortune learning each new framework and writing new apps for this and other new platforms. Bada is bada for business.
What about the end user? Isn’t choice good? Well, yes and no. Due to Samsung’s strong relationships with the carriers, we will certainly see at least a few Bada phones on the market. And the consumer, not knowing any better, will come running to the shiny, new (and most likely) extremely cheap “smartphone”. This user will then be able to explore the empty app store, then gawk over their friend’s iPhone or Android app. Oh, the apps will come! Isn’t that right Palm Pre? Um, maybe not.
So, how else does this impact the industry? Well, probably the biggest, most direct impact will come to Nokia with its struggling Symbian platform. Samsung already has phones on the Windows Mobile, Android, LiMo (Linux Mobile) and Nokia Symbian platforms. Many think that Samsung will ditch both WinME and Symbian, but due to the strong number of Windows Mobile phones in the Samsung line up, abandoning just Symbian seems more likely. Symbian has a lot to lose with the launch of Bada.
Only time will tell how Samsung will fare in the operating system arena. I can only assume that after playing in the Bada “ocean” for a year or two, Samsung will ditch the effort for a truly open platform, and the benefits of a community eager to write apps and OS improvements for an environment such as Google Android.
Until then, let the hype build while we prepare for the looming disappointment.
Keywords:
Bada, Samsung, Mobile Technology, Mobile OS, Mobile Operating Systems
11/13/09 by Cellit Staff | Blog, Marketing Blog | No Comments »
As email has evolved from text only to graphic-heavy, branded communications – the technology behind them has grown increasingly complex. Marketers have included tracking links, served ads and complex tables to better organize the massive amounts of data we cram into emails. To further complicate this, consumers are managing how and where they read their emails – providing marketers with a host of limitations to this influx of technology.
The consumer is ultimately in control – especially when it comes to email. These individuals can choose whether to read their email via an online interface, through Outlook or Entourage, or have that same email forwarded to a smart phone. And there’s very little one can do to track or change those habits, as many (including myself) do all of the above at some point throughout the day. The simple solution is to allow consumers the option of an HTML or text only version … however, that presumes I want the same experience for every medium. So what is a marketer to do?
Mobile Marketer recently had a great article on this subject, and I decided to add Cellit’s perspective – as we’ve done some consulting work on behalf of our clients in this area. Here are some high level thoughts on how you can optimize email for the mobile device:
Quickly get the end user to an alternative format: we’ve all seen the saying “can’t read this email, click here”. The problem is that oftentimes the verbiage is included after a header graphic, or includes a tracking link. It literally should be the very first bit of code put into an HTML email, which will ensure that it’s the first thing a user reads.Make the link short: there’s no reason to collect user data on the link to an alternative version. The inconvenience and degradation of the user experience far outweighs the incremental value. By creating a human readable link, you more quickly get the end user to the content – which is the real value.Create an optimized Mobile version: the alternative version doesn’t have to be just text .. in fact, it can be just as awesome as the original version. Just because a phone doesn’t render email in HTML doesn’t mean it can’t do so on the web. That being said, each phone has a different screen size and capabilities – so you’ll want to work with a vendor to use mobile user agent detection so that you can appropriately scale and format the content to meet these changing requirements.Email doesn’t have to be hard when viewed via mobile device. With a little bit of thought, you can avoid many of the mistakes and create a good user experience that covers the gamut of places users check their email.
