From the archives - It's Throw Back Thursday time again

So this time ten years ago, I was just back from my second visit to The Electric Picnic in Ireland. By all accounts, I'd had a fab time despite rain and the ensuing mud. My review of the weekend is here.

Location Based Services

Meanwhile, 10 years ago, DoCoMo was trialling in-mall location based marketing. It's weird that this was 6 years AFTER we'd done this at ZagMe and even weirder is that it was 10 years ago and we're only just beginning to see location based services (or proximity as it's known now) come to fruition. Brand Republic wrote a half decent piece on the potential of mobile for marketing and advertising. Remember, this is pre iPhone App Store days and Nokia was the best selling manufacturer by a country mile.

Branded TV Channels

In September 2006, Anheuser Busch announced they were setting up and investing US$30 million in their own TV channel for Budweiser drinkers called Bud.TV. 10 years ago, this was forward thinking and arguably, ahead of its time as it closed down in 2009 as they deemed it too expensive to sustain and the audience couldn't easily access it. Critics suggested that it closed down as the content wasn't relevant and limited in its appeal. More on the demise of Bud.TV and other branded content channels here.I would suggest that timing is key. Branded channels per se are not necessarily a bad idea. Look at the content that Red Bull comes up with that now hits mainstream TV. Bud.TV may just have been ahead of its time.

Design

Stephanie and Bryan Rieger are long-serving designers and mobilists. They are mavens of what works in mobile design and this presentation, 'Letting Go', from 5 years ago is well worth a look to remind you of what's what in mobile design. It's also a lesson in how to create beautiful presentations. 

But what about the children?

Throughout my time in mobile, there have been people thinking about how to use mobile devices to monitor and track where their kids are. They are generally a terrible idea - if a teen wants to escape your digital clutches, they are more than capable of doing that with or without the fancy tracker you've bought. I'm not really sure why they keep resurfacing. However, this one that friend and mobile ally, Carlo Longino, wrote about back in 2004 takes the biscuit name-wise. Read all about 'TeenArriveAlive.com' over on Mobhappy. It's a great takedown and well worth a read.

More from the archives soon!

All your favourite brands belong to just 10 companies

You’ve probably seen this graphic doing the rounds on social media already. But if not, it really is well worth a look. It’s called ‘The Illusion of Choice’. You see lots of brands on the supermarket shelf and you get to choose your preference – maybe you choose on price, quality, smell, taste, perceived value and more. But how much of a choice is it when those brands all belong to the same companies?

You might wonder why I think this is worthy of note. Well, I think it’s worth being mindful of what you buy and where that money is going. I didn’t know that Nestle owned L’Oreal who in turn owns The Body Shop, Stella McCartney and Kiehl’s. It’s made me think again about Kiehl’s as a brand and makes me question their product quality. And can Diesel maintain its (relatively) cool brand image when its parent company is Nestle?

Equally, I think it’s important to understand how these brands and companies do deals with each other in their own company group. One example cited is Yum Brands which owns KFC and Taco Bell. The company was a spin-off of Pepsi. All Yum Brands restaurants sell only Pepsi products because of a lifetime deal with the soda-maker. Not a lot of choice going on there.

I’m not saying don’t buy these brands, maybe just be a little more mindful each time you do.

Heroes of Mobile London Podcasts & Round-Up

Didn’t we have a lovely time, the day we went to Mozilla’s HQ last month to talk about mobile. We did three lovely sessions and they were all recorded so even if you weren’t there, you can have a listen. I’ve also included links to some articles about the sessions and the day as well in case podcasts aren’t your thing. This is cross posted from http://mobileheroes.net.

State of the Mobile Nation was chaired by Russell Buckley who is now running Ballpark Ventures and the session was sponsored by Hotwire PR. On the panel we had Eamonn Carey of Kiip, Benedict Evans from Enders Analysis, Azeem Azhar from PeerIndex and Roberta Lucca from BAFTA award-winning Bossa Studios. The group talked about the future of computing, additive printing, mobile innovation, consumer trends and a whole lot more.

 

Hotwire’s Andy West did a comprehensive write-up of the session here.

Next up was Mobile Advertising will Eat Itself. Again chaired by Russell Buckley, he was joined by Chris Bourke from Qriously, Stephen Upstone from LoopMeMedia, Greg Isbister from Blis Mobile, Denise Breslin from Mobsta and Nicky Spooner from O2 Media (now Weve). They talked innovation (or not), explained a bunch of acronyms, covered location based services and talked about how the landscape has changed over the years and what’s coming up and uncovering some of the opportunities in the sector.

 

And last but not least, we had (Mobile) Money Makes the World Go Around. Tim Green of Mobile Money Revolution chaired the session and he was joined by industry veterans Roy Vella (who will always be remembered by me for sharing the real meaning of the acronym NFC. For those of you not in the know, it’s ‘not for commerce’!), Martin Harris from Bango, Matt Dicks from BlueVia and John Maynard from mPesa. I’m not sure we drew that many conclusions but a lot of ground was covered and many issues raised. Well worth a listen.

BlueVia covered the mobile money session here.

We got covered on an interesting email discussion thread here. Thanks Bernard Tyers!

Guy Southam from The Lab at O2 covered the whole day here.

Many thanks to Hotwire PR for sponsoring and to Mozilla for hosting us. A big thank you to Russell Buckley and Tim Green for chairing and to all our panellists. Also, many thanks to Kirsty Styles and Mobile Marketing Magazine, Harold Verhagen, Emma Brincat and Inspiring Interns, Sofiana Dewi and James Norris for their support for the event.

Videos coming soon…

Brand Perfect hits San Francisco–a round-up

I was fortunate enough to be a facilitator for last week’s Brand Perfect event in San Francisco. I’ve worked in mobile marketing for 12 years now, but I still enjoy hearing about case studies and examples from other parts of the world. It’s also very useful to understand the differences (and similarities) of creating and running mobile marketing and media initiatives in different parts of the world. And there was a good crowd there to explore all of that.

The event was organised by Monotype Imaging. Not necessarily a familiar name to the mobile industry but perhaps it should be. They have several mobile solutions for network operators, handset manufacturers, creative agencies and app developers. Worth a look, with flexible pricing structures and solutions.

Anyway, I digress. The day involved a selection of keynotes looking at design, what’s happening in the mobile sector, the challenges of running mobile services, some insight into what’s possible and a look at the role of typography. In the afternoon, we divided up into groups to work on an actual brief from the University of San Francisco. This gave us a chance to put some of the learning from the morning into action – to think about design in a wider sense beyond look and feel, to distil the brief into the most important points and to focus on those and to think creatively in cross-disciplinary teams to come up with a solution. It was a fun thing to do and something I enjoyed being part of.

I’ve done a storify of the day collating some of the best tweets, resources, pictures and video clips. There are further videos to come – they’re in editing at the moment. And I’m hoping some of the presentations will make their way online too. I’ll add the links as and when that happens. In the meantime, have a look at the storify and the flickr photos below.

Personal lessons learned and some reflections on the day:

• It’s still early days for mobile marketing and media and there is still much to experiment with
• We need to do more experimenting. We have a great opportunity to reinvent marketing and advertising with this medium. It would be tragic to miss out on that.
• There’s a knowledge gap with brands, marketing people, retailers, media owners and traditional agency types. Developer relations programs from handset manufacturers et al tend to focus almost exclusively on programmers and the technical end of the spectrum. These are not always the decision makers and they are also not necessarily the ones coming up with the creative ideas. Developer relations needs to adapt and extend to other communities of interest.
• We need to forge better relationships between designers, developers, brands and commercial teams. We cannot work in silos when it comes to mobile initiatives as these touch too many parts of the business. There is a translation process that needs to happen and we need to learn and benefit from understanding the differences and being able to play to each others strengths. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
• It’s very easy to get hung up on ‘mobile’ being just about the web, apps and banner ads. There’s so much more to it and we do need to remember that. There’s another level of data and tracking available with mobile usage and additional features and capabilities that are simply not possible from a standard laptop.
• The mobile phone is the primary digital access point for a great swathe of customers and growing. Are we really taking this into consideration when designing products and services.
• Mobile services are not one-offs – they need longer term support and management for them to succeed.
• Be useful, relevant or entertaining. Customer service is a winner. We are dealing with people here ultimately. Let’s humanise the experience rather than reducing it to ones and zeros.

The event will be heading to London in the next few months and further cities around the globe. More info at http://www.brandperfect-tour.com/

 

Brand Perfect Tour's San Francisco set

Created with flickr slideshow.

How to build a brand through Social Networks

Online social networks and social media are something I play around with routinely - as a way to keep up with friends but also to keep an eye on web 2.0 and digital trends that may or may not be relevant to what I do or what my clients do.

Case in point being this blog.. I started it as an experiment to see what the 'blogging' phenomenon was all about and the best way to work it out was to start a blog myself. And here I am 383 posts and more than 2 years later still blogging away so it turned into a bit more than an experiment. Some key benefits for me have been creating my own archive of thoughts, links and stories which goes one step further than Delicious, taking part in online conversations about things mobile with other bloggers around the world and in generating business as it's a very visible resume.

But what about b2c online social networks - the likes of facebook, myspace, bebo, librarything et al? We're still making up the business models as the future is unclear, although Moblog UK seems to be doing a pretty good job around the sponsorship model.

As with anything 'social', on or offline, people move around according to where their friends hang out - whether it's a website, a bar or a nightclub. So if you want to learn more about social media and what it means in the commercial world, I have 3 tips for you..

1. Read mashable - it's a great blog covering all aspects of online social networking and is a great read (you can even get the feeds via twitter)

2. Have a read of this particular post of 'how to build a brand through social networks' from the mashable guys

3. Join Lloyd's London Social Media club which meets every Thursday in Central London where you get to do and talk about social media. And no, you don't have to be a geek to attend. Just like you don't have to be a geek to have a page on facebook.