Already an early presence in the mobile space, marketers in the travel segment plan to increase their efforts in 2012, according to the annual Frommer Unlimited Digital Content Trends survey. More than half (54%) of travel companies will be increasing their mobile spend, with 20% keeping it the same. Mobile is still only the third-most-popular area for travel content marketing investment expansions, however. Both social media marketing (65%) and brand content (55%) are even more likely to see increased investment. Apps appear to be a favorite among travel companies. In fact, the iPhone continues to get the most love from the 350 travel organizations included in the research, performed in late September. Seventy-nine percent of travel marketers are planning to develop iPhone apps in 2012. Almost half of these companies already have an iPhone app in the field, and another 30% will support the platform. Similarly, 39% have an iPad app and another 36% plan to support one in the coming year. When it comes to the increasingly important mobile Web, the Frommer survey finds that 42% of travel organizations currently support a presence, but 32% plan to. Beyond the iOS and mobile Web platforms, support recedes. Only 35% of travel marketers currently support Android smartphones specifically, and 33% have it planned. The flagging enthusiasm for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry is apparent. No longer the default businessperson’s platform, BlackBerry is only supported by 27% of travel company marketers, and only 20% have plans for it. Travel marketers head into 2012 with very practical and bottom-line intentions. Eighty-three percent of marketers in the vertical say they are increasing overall digital spend, but the chief priority in their content development for almost a third (32%) is driving conversions and attracting search traffic (27%). While there is a great emphasis on branded apps in the coming year, building brand is cited as a top priority for their content by only 16%. The Frommer survey was done in partnership with Tnooz and included airlines, agents, tour operators, hotels, tourist boards, car rental, rail, travel insurance, publishing and cruise companies.
Spotzot, which powers deals and coupons on mobile shopping apps, such as ShopSavvy, shopkick, CardStar and Geodelic, has secured $2.2 million in first-round funding. Leading the round were Cervin Ventures, Inventus Capital Partners and TiE-Silicon Valley Angles. Spotzot’s platform aggregates in-store and online promotions from 750 of the largest national and regional U.S. chains that are valid at 400,000 merchant locations. The company’s targeting technology presents the deals designed to generate the highest click-through rates, based on the user’s location, interests and shopping behaviors. It provides its technology and APIs (application programming interface) to publishers for free. Spotzot makes money by selling sponsorships and ad space around deal listings. The ads are delivered with deal listings through the APIs used by third-party mobile apps or Web sites. Publishers can configure the deal content--discount pricing, brand, merchant, and location—to suit their needs. Shopkick, for instance, uses the deals information supplied by Spotzot and integrates it with its own rewards system involving redeemable “kicks,” or points toward purchases. In July, Spotzot struck a deal with ShopSavvy to power deals on its mobile shopping app. “Spotzot’s APIs made it easy for us to quickly introduce deals into our mobile application, giving us broad control over how we display and target content,” stated Matt Weathers, head of product for ShopSavvy. Shopkick says it has about 2.1 million active users, while ShoppSavvy claims than 10 million unique users. Spotzot CEO Bobby Jadhav said the company’s technoogy serves two key markets. “We fill a void for publishers by providing a compelling, accurate and dependable source of everyday in-store shopping, grocery and dining offers to attract a broad consumer following, and we allow advertisers to reach millions of consumers with increased relevance.” The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company plans to use the new capital to accelerate development of its deals platform and expand its sales, engineering and operations staff. A study released Wednesday by mobile ad network InMobi estimates 60 million will shop via mobile phone this holiday season, with nearly a third (31%) using their devices to check updates on sales and promotions. More than a quarter (26%) will research product information and availability via mobile, and 15% will make purchases on their phones. A separate survey conducted earlier this year by Ipsos OTX and commissioned by Google found that nearly four out of five U.S. smartphone owners use their phones to help with shopping and 70% use their smartphones while in a store.
I started this year by laying out a step-by-step strategy for how to transform publishing in the age of the iPad. My January article “iDiots’ Guide to Publishing on the iPad” was a hit on Twitter. Boy, was I wrong. I dished out a ton of advice, offered specific suggestions about how publishers should cross the chasm to digital publishing, how to engage their readers, and how they should productize it. For all my good ideas, I fell short by missing the most important element: the hardest thing in the world to change is human nature. Four months after my article published, GQ, one of my favorite magazines, launched its iPad v2.0 application. It practically nailed every suggestion I had made (no thanks to me, I’m assuming -- it was probably in development months before my article). And yet… and yet, I never open the app. I am excited when a new issue arrives in the mail, but I never use it on my iPad. As a technologist, this feels fundamentally wrong. The same guy who has biometric door locks shouldn’t be excited by the arrival of dead trees. So I sat down to hash out why, offer GQ (and others) some ideas to try, and upgrade my own advice on iPad publishing to v2.0: 1. Publish early: Publish your iPad release a few days to a week before your print magazine is set to arrive. This will force your early-adopter-heavy, 18-to-35-year-old male demographic to either be patient, or go online (hint: they’re not patient). 2. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should: Take a cue from the device you are running on and keep it simple! Tiny buttons in unreliable places, big cartoonish buttons in others, and left/right/up/down/inconsistent navigation makes it a pain in the ass to consume the content. You are a magazine of cool; you need to be more Urban Daddy and less Angry Birds. 3. Nobody cares about old magazines: We are passing time, not training to be librarians. We don’t need your backlog of issues on the first screen we see. Bury that in the navigation somewhere and use the first and most important screen to engage us on your latest content. 4. Know thy subscriber: I am a paying customer, but my app home page has an enormous (and obnoxious) banner asking me to subscribe. As any good salesperson will tell you, once you close, stop selling. 5. They don’t call it the ADD generation for nothing: The moment I actually open your app with a hope of reading the latest issue, I’m smacked with a 900-megabyte download to get started. On the average flakey public WiFi connections this will take hours, if it finishes at all. Nobody buys cocktails hoping to get laid next week. Figure out how to push the content before the user wants it. So there you have it, GQ: five easy steps to creating a kickass version 3.0. I got it wrong the last time though, so I would love to hear from our readers. What do you think it will take for online magazines to surpass paper? Let them know in the comments.
“Look, honey, I made you into a Heineken Christmas card.” Actually, I’d used the company’s new holiday app to plant a Halloween photo of my wife into the Heineken Star logo, so it was a ghoulish Christmas card. She was making a rare appearance in my home office to retrieve the reams of exams she was printing out for the students in her college CompSci class. “Ew. What is the point?" “That's what I'm trying to figure out.” “This is what you do up here all day? I just slaved over an exam to teach hundreds of bright young minds the basics of programming, and you are up here diddling with a beer app on your iPhone?” “Your kids are going to need something to program someday, right?” Whether we want all those bright young minds coding branded apps is another question entirely. You have to wonder how effective all of these branded app tchotchkes are in the end. But ‘tis the season when companies start pouring into the app stores a range of nominally functional smartphone curios designed to keep their products top of mind while we go about the usual holiday planning and buying. Heineken is one of the earliest entrants into the mix, and its app has all of the usual elements. Like the 12 Days of Christmas, you can almost hear the check boxes getting ticked at mobile agencies around the land. Clever use of mobile technology? Check. The Heineken Holiday app makes it easy for card-averse dudes to send a quick greeting card via mobile using the template and heavily branded solutions in the app. Match a headline (“The Next Round Is On You” et. al.) with an image that looks much like a print magazine branding campaign. Add a personalized headline of 160 characters or less to give a semblance of personalization. Let the user position the text on the image for a custom feel and to engage the touch mechanics. Social media component? Check. Send to friends via email Twitter or Facebook. In essence, use the social nets to redistribute a print ad. Be useful. Kinda-sorta check. There is a party invitation maker in here, so you can say there is a sort of solution embedded in here. Because you all want to host a Heineken party, don’t you? Content. Check. If mobile utility was the first-gen mantra of branded apps (remember all of those tip calculators?) then content is this generation of apps’ marching order. Give the user something of value to absorb, brands are learning. Be a publisher. In this case, Heineken has party recipes from a hip chef --like Swedish Duck Meatballs -- that can also create a shopping list. Because the same guy who can’t be bothered sending holiday cards is going to host and plan a party, go shopping to make home-cooked snacks, and whip something up in his kitchen as elaborate as Swedish Duck Meatballs. Who the hell is that guy? I honestly don’t know what sort of job apps like these do for a brand other than give them executive bragging rights (“look at our app!”) and just fit into that larger carpet-bombing a beer brand just has to do around the holidays. To its credit, Heineken has so many of these little thingies in the app store it appears they just are determined to have a persistent presence on the platform: a virtual toast maker, a number of apps around Rugby, virtual games, and many different entrants from their regional units. There may be a stronger brand affinity in Europe between the beer and sport. The brand has a tendency to be pretty heavy-handed in its messaging, with stars, bottle and green pretty much everywhere. The level of branding in the holiday app is a turn-off, if only because it so overtly presumes that the user is a brand sycophant. And herein lies the problem still with too many mobile apps. They continue to maintain the brand marketer fantasy that there really are armies of loyalists who gain a sense of identity and value from associating themselves with your product. This is so rarely the case that I wonder why so many brands act as if it is. Brands that achieve that rare level of real customer identification generally have identifiable stories that simply are reiterated or enriched by an app. BMW’s Mini brand has developed a style and a narrative for itself that flows naturally from the car’s notoriously go-kart look and driving style. It has an excellent app called Mini Link that crowd-sources some of the best places in your area to drive your Mini with its famously tight steering. There is GPS, mapping, crowdsourcing, social sharing, image input, etc. but it feels more like a service that grew organically out of the needs and tastes of its target rather than just another beer coaster looking to be passed around. Mini Link even has a unique look on the home screen, turning a top-down view of the iconic car into the app’s icon. A branded app makes sense when it is an element in an ongoing narrative. No story, no app.