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Man Walks Into A Mobile Marketing Agency, Asks For App... 
Posted by Steve Smith on Nov 3, 11:50 AM
t was starting to sound like a running joke: "We tried to talk the client out of it, but they wanted their app." Panel after panel at last week's OMMA Mobile seemed to echo the same mobile marketing lament. "We tried to tell them -- it didn't fit the brand, distribution was costly, there were better alternatives out there..." Well, at least now we know why there are so many lousy apps with brand names attached to them. To paraphrase Don Draper: The client is always wrong.
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Girl Meets App: Desperately Seeking Free-dom 
Posted by Steve Smith on Oct 29, 4:30 PM
I turned my 17-year-old daughter loose in the app store last weekend just to see what happened. I agreed to let her take my cast-off 3G to use as an iPod Touch on the condition that she reported on her activities so that my readers and I could get a micro-sample of teen priorities when it comes to cell phones.
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OMMA Mobile L.A.: Strike Up The Brands 
Posted by Steve Smith on Oct 27, 1:37 PM
"You're going to L.A.?" I can hear my daughter cooking up the phony indignation. "Without me? Where was the memo on this?" Actually, it is all a dodge. She has known of the trip for months. And anyway, my journey westward for Thursday's OMMA Mobile event will make her week. The overprotective worrier in the tag-team of "helicopters" she calls her parents will be off-radar for a few days. And this week, at least, I will be distracted by a show that I myself am excited to see.
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Can TV Networks Figure Out That Second Screen? 
Posted by Steve Smith on Oct 22, 11:40 AM
An announcement from ESPN this week seems to have fallen outside of the mobile industry's radar, but to me it indicates just how quickly the mobile Web is accelerating. According to the sports brand, traffic to its mobile Web sites rose 82% between September 2008 and September 2009.
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Hunting For Consumer ROI 
Posted by Steve Smith on Oct 20, 1:43 PM
Being the glutton for mobile marketing punishment that I am, I spent a hunk of time the other night taking phone cam snaps of the latest issue of Wired magazine. In a partnership with kooaba, the Conde Nast book is mobilizing almost all of its ad pages so that users can snap a picture of most ads in the November issue and get content in return from the kooaba iPhone/Android app. As Wired publisher Howard Mittman says in his announcement in the issue, "Imagine an ad that comes to life - that uses emerging technologies to augment what an advertisement says and how you experience it." This may be his and the magazine industry's fantasy. I am not sure I have heard a consumer utter this wish.
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Pepsi, Stay The Hell Away From My Daughter  
Posted by Steve Smith on Oct 15, 3:36 PM
Somewhere in the bowels of PepsiCo, executives must be scurrying to meet today, but it is still unclear what the agenda will be. They might be trying to decide how to limit the potential PR damage from their "AMP Up: Before You Score" branded app for iPhones. Or they may be patting themselves on the back and declaring "mission accomplished." When a promotional campaigns succeeds in offending some segment of the population and at the same time nabs priceless PR buzz that helps you find your more sympathetic target audience, how do you score it?
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Your Brand App Hit Parade  
Posted by Steve Smith on Oct 13, 12:28 PM
Before any of you mobile marketers acquiesce to another client's demand for their own cool iPhone app, run, don't walk to freelancer Johnny Makkar's superb compendium of branded apps at his Attention Digital blog. He created an enormous Google spreadsheet of 211 apps that includes their user ratings, number of ratings, category, etc.
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Apps And The Revenge Of The Silo  
Posted by Steve Smith on Oct 8, 12:03 PM
"Wow, is that the new PSP?" I still get a thrill when I can succeed in WOW-ing my daughter with a new gadget. After having been the first one on her block to have the last three generations of game consoles, access to Mobile TV, an iPhone, a Kindle, and more assorted digital devices than my basement now can handle, she is pretty much underwhelmed when Dad the media critic tosses another one to her for review. I am not sure why the new, smaller PSPgo unit impressed her -- but she glommed onto it, even as it actually confused her a bit.
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Going Global: A World Beyond The App  
Posted by Steve Smith on Oct 6, 9:48 PM
As you read this, Google and Verizon have already made their announcement that Android phones will be coming to the largest mobile network in the U.S. Oh, goody -- more apps. Because, you know, there aren't enough of them already.
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