A technically innovative and creative use of one-to-many mobile broadcasting allows users to control the color of a Nashville agency's corporate signage. More than clever, it points to some interesting ways of personalizing and empowering the most impersonal marketing tool -- public, static signage.

Amex turned over its Instagram feed to a customer a week ago to post his everyday personal use of the card. When it works, such a campaign succeeds in reminding us why brands should stop trying to sound like people.

Citi issued a major revision to its banking app this week, focusing on streamlining the basics rather than dazzling us with new ATM functions. As people's priorities in choosing a bank brand shift, frictionless mobile utility could play a role in deciding the great bank brand wars.

Second-screen apps appear to be in a period of retrenchment. After a first stage of enthusiasm over the concept but underwhelming usage, we may be discovering that TV's "mass audience" was never really much of a "mass" in the first place.

Mobile video is not just about a new screen -- it's about a cluster of new cultures, a new aesthetic of brevity and perhaps even the leading edge of a post-ad era in marketing. In other words, you can't get away with what we have been getting away with for the last 60 years of TV advertising.

At the Mobile Insider Summit, discussions about showrooming, local mobile marketing and cross-screen consumer journeys all seemed to lead back to a larger debate over changed behaviors. Is mobility changing us, or are we adjusting the technologies to old needs?

If Facebook is leaking users, the pace is pretty slow, according to the latest global survey. And the company owns what is by far the fastest-growing social net, Instagram. "Collapsing" companies could be in worse positions.

Marketers are exploring ways of integrating voice interfaces to handle higher-level interactions with customers. But how much do any of us really want to talk to our machines?

Longtime sweepstakes and contest agency ePrize starts a major rebranding effort under the new name HelloWorld. With mobile as a centerpiece, the company wants to do for complex customer engagement campaigns what Salesforce.com and Oracle have done in CRM.

About a fifth of shoppers occupy a core of heavily mobile, digitally dependent customers who are ready, willing and able to engage retailers via devices in-store.