Earning Attention

Lots of publishers and third parties have been experimenting with different rich media ad formats for smartphones. Crisp has entered the fray with a compelling unit that seems to strike a good balance between exposure for the advertiser and user experience. I especially like how it can be configured to disappear while scrolling to prevent accidental clicks, and the expanding menu is a nice touch.

With the launch of the iPad, this and other smartphone rich media units become much more important. Lack of Flash support will limit an advertiser's ability to deploy their existing Flash-based rich media units. These formats that were born for smartphones can easily be adapted for the iPad, and may well be key to early ad success on the platform.

Press release here.

as pointed out by Brian Morrissey at Adweek, in the wake of Google's $750 million acquisition of AdMob, everyone is running around declaring 2009 "the year of mobile."

Mobile has a long way to go before it's all neat and tidy, but certain pieces of the ecosystem have become fairly mature and deserve serious consideration in the marketing mix. More at ClickZ.

Retailers need to encourage usage of mobile apps: Study

January 23, 2009

Shopping for an opinion

Great data here. I think the hidden insight here is that consumers are already doing things like price comparisons, checking reviews, etc. - even though NO ONE has really made that an easy, fast and elegant experience. There is a tremendous opportunity for retailers to solve that problem, make it simple, and OWN hearts and minds as a result. The consumer demand is clear.

Interesting finding, though perhaps not all that surprising.

Other interesting data in the study:
- 38% of ALL teens, regardless of cell phone ownership, text on a daily basis (and 76% of teen cell phone owners have ever sent a text message). This is relatively consistent with other numbers I've seen (Comscore reports 80% of cell phone subs age 13-17 have sent a text message).
- 77% of teens own a game console like an Xbox or a PlayStation
- 74% of teens own an iPod or mp3 player

Managing a marketing program across all these devices and platforms is already challenging; but fragmentation shows no sign of slowing down. That's why it's so important to be testing and experimenting now - it takes a good bit of trial and error to get it right.

According to Scarborough Research, 8.6 million (or 8 percent) of U.S. households currently acquire coupons via text messages and/or email.

Sunday newspapers are still the most popular way households obtain coupons at 51 percent, followed by in-store coupons (35 percent), mail (31 percent), loyalty card programs (21 percent), in-store circulars (20 percent), weekday newspapers (17 percent), product packages (16 percent), magazines (15 percent) and Internet sites (7 percent).

Smartphone growth forecasted to go nutty by 2011.