Tag: Josh-Lovison

$100 Per Download: The eBay iPhone Story

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$100 per download: The eBay iPhone story What’s the value of an iPhone app download for a brand? The answer varies wildly. For eBay, the value was nearly $100 in sales per download. According to an article in the Financial Times, eBay’s iPhone app has seen over $400 million in sales to date, from just over 4.6 million downloads. To be precise, that came out to $89.95 in sales per download – but the year end (and holiday season) hasn’t yet come.

With numbers like those, one must wonder what kind of ROI Amazon is seeing with their iPhone app. But more than anything, this news points to two key ideas: Mobile commerce is the here and now, and the mobile divide keeps getting wider. Continue reading “$100 Per Download: The eBay iPhone Story”

Your creative deptartment’s new BFF

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Who is your creative dept's BFF? (Flickr/sirmightymac)Adobe recently went from near irrelevant in mobile marketing to king-of-the-hill. While Flash has taken online rich media by storm, a few months ago it was barely supported on any mobile handsets, and for the few which did claim Flash support, it was an incarnation that was bordering on painful. How quickly things can change in today’s mobile market.

The big news has been the addition of iPhone and iPod Touch-compatible file export from Flash Professional CS5. Flash developers can take existing or new Flash assets and use those to create iPhone apps with minimal optimization, and no knowledge of Objective C (which is what iPhone apps are written in). For creative agencies (and the media agencies trying to get those creative agencies to support an iPhone app) this is great news. Continue reading “Your creative deptartment’s new BFF”

Why in-app commerce is on the rise

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Why in-app commerce is on the riseThe promise has hung around mobile for years: Just pay with your phone. When any extra inconvenience can result in a lost sale, ease and convenience are paramount. The mobile promise of engaging with a customer anywhere, and immediately converting that engagement to a sale, has been the penultimate retail fantasy. So why has it taken so long to start to see this behavior?

Well, the funny thing with a fantasy is that reality can often be a letdown. Getting back to one’s roots camping off the beaten path in a forest is great, until facing the realities of bugs, bears, and rain (unless that’s your thing – it’s not mine). Mobile might have been promising ease and convenience, but the experience for several years has been anything but. Want to buy something with SMS? Well, the carrier is going to take a large cut of that transaction, and the bill is going to appear on the user’s phone bill (which is a pain point for many US consumers). Enter payment details online? Good luck navigating that WAP page. So what’s merged the fantasy with the reality? Continue reading “Why in-app commerce is on the rise”

What will be heir to the Twitter throne?

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What will be heir to the Twitter throne? (iStock/Twitter)(Originally published in iMedia Connection)

There is no easy answer to the question, What will be the next Twitter? Yesterday, it was Friendster and then MySpace; today we are hooked on YouTube, Facebook, and, undeniably, Twitter — our friendly neighborhood microblogging buzz juggernaut. So who has staying power and what is next on the horizon for big digital breakthroughs?

In the past, there was an apparent distinction between one-way media and collaborative media. Today, the lines have been blurred. Imagine complete communication with your social circle, no matter what website you are visiting, what project you are working on, what game you are playing, or which TV show you are watching. This is the true promise of social media.

There is a lot of innovation that will take place over the coming years, and we will see new tools enter the market that have the power to make individual viewing experiences social. In the meantime, no marketing campaign or engagement these days can be created and sustained without considering the potential of making a social connection.

At the IPG Emerging Media Lab, we have identified five players that we feel will truly carry the promise of social media forward. But first, a look at the platforms that are bringing social functionality into their core reason for being. Read more.

The battle over wireless networks begins

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The battle for net neutrality begins (iStock)The FCC has thrown down the gauntlet about network neutrality. While there is a case to be made both for and against a government mandated network neutrality, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is strongly making the case for it. He’s working to have the FCC’s current governing principals turned into hard-coded rules, and to increase the four to six, adding in a principal regarding network non-discrimination (aka neutrality) and one on transparency and openness.
Those are some fighting words.

The FCC has so far skirted around the issues of network neutrality, ruling in ways that indicated their support of the concept, but not calling it out specifically. This latest move is going to cause ripples. Continue reading “The battle over wireless networks begins”

Game marketing lessons from retailers

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Ubisoft Montreal/Target Column originally featured on MediaPost

There’s a recent trend among video game retailers that’s worthy of note for brand marketers. For a while now, retailers such as GameStop have been offering exclusive extras for their customers. These premiums were typically small tchotchkes, small inexpensive trinkets. But now we’re seeing this trend extend into the realm of downloadable content.

I recently returned from a vacation to Italy, where I saw the Palazzo Medici — an exquisite palace built during the Renaissance by Florence’s resident ruling family. If I want to access the Palazzo in Ubisoft’s upcoming game “Assassin’s Creed 2,” I’ll have to purchase the title from GameStop. This is hardly the only instance of this type of promotion. Read more.

How to avoid in-game ad debacles

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How to avoid outrage for in-game ads (Anyaka via Flickr)Column originally featured on MediaPost

Last week, columnist Shankar Gupta noted the loading time debacle with “Wipeout HD”‘s in-game ads. The story is a frightening one for marketers unfamiliar with the gaming space. What was essentially a 10-second mistake resulted in the early termination of a campaign and loads of upset customers. Is the gaming space really so unpredictable and volatile?

Yes and no. Gamers can be a surly sort, quick to band together for a common cause against a shared enemy. But it’s really not that difficult to know how to avoid conflict. A key concept here is one that really should prevail for all media channels: The best advertising is perceived by a consumer as content. The “rocket science” for gaming ads involves maximizing ROI, targeting the buy, and leveraging the in-game elements into a larger integrated campaign. Avoiding a riot shouldn’t be rocket science, and here are a few tips to help avoid such a scenario. Read More.

EA: A market trend?

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EA: A marketing trend? (Sims3)Column originally featured on MediaPost

Electronic Arts is shaking things up and leading by example. The video game company seems to be evolving a new approach to game publishing, one that promises a cross-platform distribution model fortified against piracy.

The game worth looking at closely for following this trend is “The Sims 3.” The title launched but a few months ago, and has now seen over 3.7 million copies sold, outstripping the previous bestseller “The Sims 2.” What’s interesting about these sales is that they follow a torrent (pun intended) of pirated downloads from a leaked version of the game prior to release. Rather than lamenting the piracy, EA execs suggested that internally, they shifted the viewpoint to seeing the leaked version as an “extended demo.” The reason behind this was the sheer volume of additional content exclusive to registered users that didn’t ship on the retail disk.

EA has instead approached the Sims franchise as a content portal to additional downloads, some of which were free, and others for pay. They are now adding this same model to the iPhone version of “The Sims 3,” making use of in-app commerce enabled by the iPhone 3.0 software release. This brings up the other facet of EA’s burgeoning model that’s extremely compelling: cross distribution.  Read more.

Why Apple, AT&T, and consumers are at odds

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Why Apple, AT&T and consumers are at oddsIn tech circles, Apple’s been making some decisions that have concerned many consumers (not to mention Google’s CEO, who resigned from Apple’s board Monday). They have potentially caused serious damage to their relationship with Google, and undermined much of the promise of leading the charge in bringing unparalleled functionality to the mobile phone.

So what happened? The first recent rumblings of discontent came around the time of the 3.0 software launch and the release of the iPhone 3GS. While the iPhone now had sanctioned video capabilities, some of the very neat live broadcasting solutions like Qik or Flixwagon weren’t being allowed into the AppStore, despite already having software functioning flawlessly for months on jailbroken versions of the iPhone.

Then the trouble with Google started. Continue reading “Why Apple, AT&T, and consumers are at odds”

Is Nielsen right on teens?

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teensaThe human brain loves outliers. It uses them to provide new perspectives on the norm. With this in mind, Nielsen’s recent How Teens Use Media report attempts to ignore outliers, and look purely at research to give a perspective of teen media consumption, and in so doing, attempts to portray a more grounded and non-biased perspective of teen behavior.

Unfortunately for Nielsen, bias is unavoidable, and their report ignores certain outliers to the detriment of its overall perspective. The report’s findings, covering all of Nielsen’s research properties, showcases the inability of non-integrated research to accurately portray the behavior of the most integrated generation. Continue reading “Is Nielsen right on teens?”