Earning Attention

Links, news and thoughts on how marketers can leverage new and emerging media

Which is the future of mobile - apps or advanced web functionality?

As these technologies become more common and iPhones continue to become faster, it's easy to see how the future web applications could replace some of the current native App Store apps.
via macrumors.com

There's nothing terribly new here, but it does reprise the ongoing debate - are native apps really the mobile platform of the future? Or as browser capabilities and network speed improves, does the web/cloud win?

Is there any benefit to a downloadable application? Everyone says local storage for offline access. True in the near term, but again, as carriers continue to improve their networks and wifi seems to be everywhere - including in-flight, will we really need local storage?

I believe that mobile will follow the desktop trend and ultimately move away from native apps and more towards web/cloud-based functionality. The real question is how long it takes.

Estee Lauder's social media and cross-channel campaign is an interesting experiment from a luxury brand

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via dmnews.com

Interesting for two reasons: 1) as the article notes, it's great to see Luxury brands adopting online marketing strategies and tapping the potential of social influence marketing; and 2) here's a great way for a brand marketer to begin to quantify the impact of digital in terms of driving foot traffic to the makeup counter. It's a challenge many online marketers are wrestling with, looking to things like mobile couponing and other promotions to get at cross-channel measurement. This will be a big focus in 2010.

The real reason Google bought AdMob?

Goggle’s recent purchase of AdMob for $750 million sent a clear signal that big players are getting serious about mobile advertising. As I wrote recently in ClickZ, despite the beginnings of mobile consolidation and the rich investment the giant made, it may be premature to declare 2009 “the year of mobile.”

Google bought AdMob for a lot of reasons. AdMob is a clear leader in the mobile ad space, which is projected to finish 2009 at $416 million, a growth rate of 30% YOY according to eMarketer. The purchase fits in to what seems to be Google’s expansion plans for both CPC text link media and display inventory. Etc., etc. The investment makes sense from a bunch of different angles.

But here’s one that I haven’t seen many people talk about: as of August 2009 the iPhone made up 40% of the ad requests across AdMob’s network. They serve ads into a bunch of popular iPhone applications as well as a wide variety of mobile web sites. That is a treasure trove of consumer behavior data that Google can use to fuel future developments in Android, the Android Market, AND with the rumored Google-branded phone. Combine AdMob’s iPhone data with Google’s own application data and insights from Google services like Google Analytics, Google Maps, and many other popular Google web services accessed heavily by iPhone users, and suddenly Google has perhaps the clearest vision into what iPhone users are doing outside of Apple and AT&T.

Not a bad way for Google to keep an eye on what it likely views as the #1 competitor for it’s own mobile offerings.