On the day's first panel, focusing on using apps to build closer relations with customers, Ted Hong, Chief Marketing Officer, Fandango, revealed Apple CEO Steve Jobs has used the company's app 60 times in the last five years in the Cupertino area. How did find that out? "We peaked," he acknowledged, asking that no one blog, Tweet or post anything about that to Facebook. Oh, well. Hong mentioned Jobs avid movie going using the Fandango app to highlight what a difference it's made, with mobile purchases now accounting for 20% of sales compared to only single digits previously. It also …

That's what I took away from OMMA Mobile opening keynoter Ed Kaczmarek's presentation this morning. Kaczmarek, the director of innovation-consumer experiences at Kraft Foods, was talking about a new mobile apps platform dubbed CauseWorld, which ties cause-related marketing to Kraft's products and brands. When consumers participate in the apps, Kaczmarek said the users accrue "karmas," or points for engaging with Kraft's brands.  Initial findings have been encouraging, but Kaczmarek said Kraft wanted to see if they could improve on karma, so they came up with something, well, new and improved. He calls them "Double Karmas." "The double karmas …

Who says the shelf life of an app is less than a quart of milk? Kicking things off with today's keynote at OMMA Mobile, Ed Kaczmarek, director of innovation, consumer experiences, Kraft Foods, and father, if you will, of the company's popular ifood assistant app for the iPhone and other devices, points out that 85% of those who downloaded the 2.0 version of the app in November are still using it. What's more, the ifood assistant has been a customer acquisition tool for Kraft, with 90% of users not previously Kraft customers. It also appears to be getting men into …

Day 1 The round table sessions following day 1 of the Search Insider Summit were jammed pack and made for some very good discussions. eCommerce Advertiser Round Table: Lucinda Duncalfe Holt, CEO of ClickEquations led this roundtable and provided the following notes: There are fundamental shifts underway in search marketing. First, search and social are coming together. Second, there’s a coming wave of proliferation of search-like channels coming. These two dynamics will drive deep changes in search marketing. The best way to think about the proliferation of channels is to go where your customers are. The reality is …

Augmented reality is pretty friggin neat. Goodby Silverstein and Mekanism produced a whole augmented reality, uh, thing for Doritos. Kinda hard to explain, but: you could hold a bag of Doritos up to your webcam, whereupon the bag will (appear to) burst open, roll out a stage, and allow you to see a "live" performance by Blink 182 or Outkat's Big Boy. The production was obviously very complex, involving lots of technical stuff that I will never, ever understand, but the final product was quite awesome: you can rotate the bag and the stage, and the band, will rotate with …

Tommy Means from Mekanism took the audience at OMMA Global though a brief history of augmented reality that included the first-ever on-screen erection at an OMMA show â€" a dramatic first. The rest of the history went a little something like this: Starting with the '60sThrough the '80s Before getting into the modern version we're all familiar with featuring web cams and smartphones, and presenting the campaign the shop did for Doritos with Goodby, Silverstein in which the likes of Big …

In the week after AKQA bowed a mobile app campaign for the new Volkswagen GTI, which allowed players to race virtual racetracks in the new model, eight cars were purchased by people who had downloaded the app. At a list price of $25,000, that's $150,000. To date they've sold 175 cars from this game, according to Charlie Taylor, the general manager for digital marketing and motorsports at VW. That's abotu $4.4 million. Taylor also said that the campaign is producing a 99% lower cost-per-sale.