The beauty of mobile is that it unshackles people from their desks and lets them roam the real world and still have real-time access to their interactive world.
This is going to be an area where we will see artists and brands try to mine. This is not about just simply running ads on mobile devices, but creating new experiences by merging the real with the interactive and mobile.
One nice example is Musicity, a project from Jump Studios in London, that encourages users to experience buildings and architecture in a new way. Users access Musicity through a mobile application that shows them the geographic location of MP3 files they can play.
These locations are famous and important buildings and the tracks will only play when the user is at the location. It's basically a self-guided walking tour with a twist.
This is just the tip of the iceberg; the ability of mobility to reach users with unique content and experiences, based on their precise geographic location is going to be a gold mine for those with the imagination to exploit it.
Posted by Ed Cotton
Kudos to Mark Lewis for his second edition of Planningness which I attended in Brooklyn yesterday. The standout sessions for me were, the one given by London-based experience designers- Made by Many" and the talk by Chris Heathcote on mobile.
Made by Many took us inside their process and it was impressive. They explained that their inspiration came from the world of agile software development, where unlike ad agencies baton passing process, you do a lot of things in parallel.
I really liked the early stage brainstorming process which was really simple and don't let the loudest in the room dominate. Instead, they get clients to fast sketch concepts and ideas and in hour seem to come up with a lot of though starters, some of which they bring to life and perhaps even test.
Heathcote did possibly the best mobile presentation I've seen. Instead of talking about applications and ad units, he suggested the thing we need to develop great ideas is to understand what's inside the guts of a phone or mobile device.
To me, most attempts at trying to get to mobile ideas involve looking at competitive applications and trying to put a twist on them. Heathcote's way suggests creatives need to know about all the functionality like- accelerometers, voice recognoition, smile recognition, the microphone, the speakers, etc and think about how they might play with those and perhaps even combine them.
In Heathcote's world, the Creative Technologist plays a key role, without them, you can't really do this.
I am now really looking forward to Day 2.
Posted by Ed Cotton
A great video from Steve Johnson explaining where great ideas come from.
Here's his take in summary...
1. Ideas take a lot of time to form
2. They exist in half-formed hunch form for a long-time
3. Create spaces where hunches can be formed into ideas
4. Connectivity can help create new ideas- think web
5. Distraction is reality- but more ways to connect and to stumble
His final thought...
"Chance favors the connected minded.
Posted by Ed Cotton
The idea of dropping tracks in geographic locations brings a whole new way of thinking about how music can work in physical space.
Great for bands wanting to tie tracks to venues or to areas of inspiration and therefore give fans more of an experience/story around the creation/inspiration for the music at hand by attaching it to a physical space.
TrackDropper from Yves Raimond on Vimeo.
Beyond bands, think of how brands could use this to tell their stories, or offer specific geo-cached type rewards for learning and discovery?Perhaps something interesting happens when you mash-up this idea with a check-in service like Four Square to get audio tags and files layered on top of basic text.
Posted by Ed Cotton
(1) Posted by Ed Cotton
Cool communities no longer exist just in physical spaces, they can be found clustered together virtually.
Geography is the way we tend to orient ourselves around most things- we've always thought of traditional media in geographic terms (local cable, local newspapers, radio, OOH, etc) and some people even want to convert digital media to geographic entities.
Peter Warden, the creator of Open Heat Map did a great job in a recent blog post of explaining the rise of Twitter, this phemom that defied the laws of geography and sold itself on the broad appeal of the "Silicon Valley dream", as Peter explains..
I'd also never thought of Twitter as an aspirational service, but Neha nailed the atmosphere of the early days. There was an air of exclusivity, of access to an interesting group of Valley rockstars, that gave people a reason to check it out. This feels a lot like the way that Facebook started at Ivy League colleges and then opened up progressively to lower-status groups with the promise of mixing with a 'better class' of people. That might explain why companies like Google have such a hard time launching similar services, catering to the masses they can't pretend they're exclusive, but it bodes well for Quora's approach.
The reality of its rapid adoption all over the country is hard to square with its image as an exclusive Valley club, but maybe that contradiction is the sign of exquisite marketing. Apple gives their users that same sensation of belonging to an elite, even as they sell products in malls across the country. Twitter tapped into people whose dreams were in Silicon Valley, wherever they were in the world."
The future of media planning depends on a deep and rich understanding of target audiences and communities that exist post-geographically and the secret is finding surprising and interesting ways to bring these communities together to participate as richly as they do in the geographic world.
Posted by Ed Cotton