by Steve Smith on Jan 31, 10:18 AM
At last week's Mobile Insider Summit in Key Largo, Fla., Yelp, Google Maps, and all the other usual suspects I consult for nearby resources were not going to be of much help here. We were in another world. The remote, painfully exclusive Ocean Reef Club wasn't the kind of place where you will find quick takeout, a 7-Eleven or a chain of any sort. No, if we wanted to hear directly from local merchants using mobile marketing, we were going to have to airlift them in. Which we did. For a superb panel on how real local businesses are using …
by Steve Smith on Jan 26, 11:53 AM
The other day at Best Buy I encountered my first sighting of a mobilized tag-team couple. In the lead, the wife picked up cameras and accessories and recited the brands and model numbers, while the husband did mobile lookups on Amazon and barked out prices. These two had it down to an efficient science and a great division of labor. She was curating choices and he was acting as a kind of C3PO digital assistant.
by Steve Smith on Jan 24, 10:22 AM
If the new "Numberlys" interactive story and game on the iPad looks and feels like a German Expressionist movie poster that somehow found its way onto "Sesame Street," you aren't far from the mark. In this follow-up to the hugely successful "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," the creators at Moonbot admit that Fritz Lang had more than a little to do with the monochrome modernist aesthetic. A series of drone-like bots in a world of numbers tries to build a new consciousness by discovering an alphabet. Mixing highly filmic sequences right out of Lang's "Metropolis" and straightforward …
by Steve Smith on Jan 19, 12:36 PM
There was a lot of time to multitask during last Sunday's Golden Globes. Ricky Gervais was tepid at best, and generally unfunny at worst. The winners often seemed unaffected by the award themselves. And there was no apparent drunkenness. Unless a celebrity is embarrassing him or herself, or Gervais is doing it for them, I hardly see the point of this show. It was a good time to warm up the iPad and see what was on that screen.
by Steve Smith on Jan 17, 12:34 PM
Mobile coupons are a no-brainer. Not having to clip, save and remember to carry print promotions is a convenience that should in theory supercharge the coupon format. But apparently it will take some brains to figure out how to execute on the promise.
by Steve Smith on Jan 12, 1:29 PM
'Tis the season to rate mobile competence. Digital think tank L2 says that Sephora, Nordstrom, Macy's and NET-A-Porter are the most "mobile-competent" among what it calls "prestige" brands. In L2's new study, Prestige 100 Mobile IQ, the most recognizable brands were measured across 250 parameters, including their mobile sites, apps, marketing approaches and innovation.
by Steve Smith on Jan 10, 12:19 PM
I have been playing with both the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet for the last month trying to work through why I have to force myself to use them. In weeks of carrying them around, I still find that their chief attribute is weight. In my everyday digital media routines I am most likely to use them as a relatively light ebook reader when lying in bed. In other words, for all their other functionality, their core use for me remains with each device's roots in the Nook and Kindle eReader platforms.
by Steve Smith on Jan 5, 10:56 AM
Mobile 2D codes are inevitably fascinating to marketers even as they remain relatively obscure to many consumers. In a recent study of consumer behavior and QR codes, cmb Consumer Pulse found that only 21% of over 1,200 consumer surveyed in October 2011 knew what the term "QR code" meant.
by Steve Smith on Jan 3, 2:36 AM
Much like the Battle of Stalingrad, the mobile skirmishes for consumer attention at retail are likely to become tactical and granular. All of the usual in-store merchandising techniques get disrupted, from shelf arrangements to end cap positioning, salesmen pitches to signage. And what place do manufacturer/suppliers have in all of this now? Do they have better access to the consumer by cutting mobile merchandising deals with retailers in much the same way they might in a circular or in-store exposure? Should they be working with all of these third-party scan code and product-look-up solutions in order to insert themselves into …
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