• Red-Eying OMMA Mobile
    On a plane heading east after yesterday's OMMA Mobile in Los Angeles, I was trying to do a quick download of all the things I had learned throughout the day as the rest of the US Airways flight slept. I used to be able to sleep on red-eye flights, but now it is just work time. I am sure as the days progress and I catch up on some sleep the takeaways will be more numerous and detailed. But there were some themes reiterated throughout the day that really stuck with me, even at 3 a.m. somewhere over the Rockies.
  • The Brands You Love -- No, Really Love
    still can't tell whether many of the branded apps I see even now were built with some real marketing objective in mind -- or simply to look good at the next company board meeting. The line between utility and brand vanity seems like it should be an easy one to discern. But the latest run of branded apps for the iPad are tough ones to call. In just the last few weeks we have seen ambitious releases from Victoria's Secret, Gucci and Coca-Cola. They all have their charms. Humility is not among them. In each, the brand paints itself large …
  • Reality-Checking The IAds
    I still am not convinced that the iAds are that compelling a model for mobile advertising. I understand from anecdotes and press reports that some of the brand advertisers are very pleased with the performance they are seeing from the iAds. But what else are you going to say after ponying up a few million and handing creative control over your message to a third party? As a consumer, I know I am tapping on iAds now just to see what is there, not because the call to action is especially strong. Novelty is not a foundation for sustained performance. …
  • Strike Up The Brand: Changing The Conversation
    At next Tuesday's OMMA Mobile show in L.A., "Strike Up the Brands," we will be bringing you executives from Adidas, ING Direct, Buick, Paramount, Sony, ESPN, VISA, and Honda to discuss how their brands are engaging the mobile opportunity. That we were able to bring together so many brand marketers from across such a range of categories underscores just how serious brands are getting and have gotten about the platform.
  • Baby Talk: Looking For Mobile Languages
    New parental rule: You know your kid is really ticked off at you when a heated SMS exchange gets kicked over to email. "I'm done being nice about this," my daughter started in after deciding that the laundry list of my transgressions had exceeded the limits of heated bursts in 140 characters or less. In fact, poking through my girl's teen force field and into an honest conversation has been an object lesson in the unsettled state of new-media narrative. As I discussed in my last post, we are in that Neanderthal period of mobile media where we don't yet …
  • After the App Frenzy... A New Medium
    We're going to get pickier about the apps we download as the novelty wears off and the torrents of mobile content start wearing us down. Most of us know this intuitively as, over time, we tap into the App Store just a little less often and we come to see just how many icons on our handset never get used. Our own behaviors and past experiences with app consumption may well be reteaching us how to use the platform going forward.
  • Meanwhile, Back at the Portal...
    Given the app-happy state of things in the mobile arena these days, it's easy to forget that the mobile Web continues to thrive. A sobering stat comes out of the latest comScore research on mobile usage, for instance. While 55.7 million Americans now own smartphones, only 32.3% of all mobile subscribers used a downloaded app in August. Slightly more, 34.5%, used their mobile Web browsers.
  • Play With Power: Inspired By Gaming
    Since I began covering mobile media back in 2004 or so, I seem to have been writing an annual rant that urges Nintendo to come in and "own" the mobile gaming market. For years, feature phone game design sucked so badly no matter how many big guns were aimed at it, mobile seemed the perfect place for this master of simple, clean gaming.
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