Some advice to Agency and Brand Owners - The evolution of mobile marketing

You're going to need a platform, not just an cute application.
A longer term vision of what you want to achieve, a strategy that is integrated with CRM, sales objectives, meaningful marketing initiatives that drive value into your business.
Too often we see digital marketing agencies and brands come to us asking if we can make a cute game so their customers can play while there's a background message going on.
Often they will have developed this idea to where it reaches POS. Several of them will even have designed decals and have an idea of what to do in phase 2 after they have enjoyed rich success with their phase 1 app.
Problem is, most likely, unless the game idea is fantastically exciting, no one is going to play it twice (you'll get one timers, some people will try anything), but not many will GET it. this kind of play is usually the work of a ad agency, devoid of a genuine strategy, who is trying to "sell" their customer a newspaper campaign (and the app is just a by product).
Both the Agency and client would be much better served with a genuine mobile platform upon which to achieve their goals.
We recently spoke with a health care brand. their agency sold them a re-packaged beer brand campaign using augmented reality in a cute idea. The cute idea made the beer brand a lot of press. it was a cute idea. the health care brand bought it. It wasn't new, it wasn't relevant and it didn't get any press. But they did spend 250k on newspaper advertising and 50k on the "use once only game/app".
For 300k the health care brand could have built a long term customer engagement platform from which it would generate revenues, build customer loyalty, provide a platform of engagement from which to interact, learn and service its customers. What is more outrageous, is that the Ad agency would also make more money than it did from its creatives and media booking fee!
Digital pathways are fast emerging and the Cellcity platforms to reach out are in place for Agencies and Brands alike. But we are seeing a lot of roadkill along the way.

A quick check on the journey

I remember an encounter in 2002 like it was yesterday.

Mobile apps (or rather the platform to host them) i was told was the future. i had heard this mobile related "future" for some time.

but the thing that caught my attention was the number of games and apps this guy had on his phone. It was 2002. He was Korean. I was in Singapore. The iPhone was not yet conceived. what he showed me was barely understood, but not that different from a Microsoft, Bill Gates presentation vision of the future i had seen in 1995.

Now i didn't really understand what the hell was going on in his mobile phone, there was tv and cartoons and korean language messed up in what looked like something my dog coughed up, but he was pretty damn excited.

he also showed me some intel from KTF (Korea Telecom), that showed some pretty dynamic numbers on the increase of apps and games dev on mobile. so from a busines perspective he really got me thinking.

he also had one statement in his ppt that really caught my attention. I still love it. It was that if telcos dont change their attitude they'd become "just bit pipes" (nothing but data transfer lanes).

So fast forward. seems like the rest of the world started catching up. Asia first and then the not so wild west. at first it was just SMS (still is in some respects), then Nokia lurched forward to encourage developers but failed to adapt the hardware... other vendors started going smart phone oriented, governments started thinking, yahoo, google, MS started thinking, but they were all too slow. And then the iPhone happened, and the west started to have influence again.

Telcos started becoming bit pipes... some are getting smarter, but most are too slow.

Nokia should have been the pioneers in apps, but the Nokia bosses wouldn't listen to consumer demand. soon the best mobile phones in the world (they still make a better mobile telephone than Apple), would be marginalized by a slick application and game platform. it was too easy.

Apple's marketing and packaging expertise made Nokia and everyone else look like the kid at school with a booger hanging out of his nose! still do. look at the crap packaging Nokia puts its phones in. designed by some prat from nowhere. The iphone might be designed in China... but they are just improvising from a polished Steve Jobs led review of what is great.

In 2002, i started planning a strategy on mobile. it was always a platform oriented strategy. making apps was always connected to a platform.

In 2006 i met a young guy who was interested in alternative ideas. in tech and in mobile. together we built Cellcity (with the support of a whole bunch of great people along the way).

today we are one of the few companies to offer not only apps on iPhone but all platforms in our xPlatform strategy, upon which we offer our mobile coupon platform, ad serving platform, m-commerce platform and a host of services from consultation through to marketing and hosting.

i didn't see all that in 2002 (in specifics of what we would develop). the original platform was to enable Telco companies to deliver mobile apps. we did that. then we created a digital rights management platform to enable music companies to deliver music in the digital age (but music companies have still not switched on to digital sales and marketing), and then we started developing platforms as above to deliver whatever you want, any industry, any app anywhere.

flashback. the Koreans said ... we improvised. now we have.