idon’t care, istill love my iphone
the verizon/moto/android ‘idon’t’ ad attacking iphone misses the mark for me.
you clearly don’t get why ilove my iphone – revolutionize a category through product and interface design and imight learn to love you too:
Future of mobile
i’m currently doing some research for a future media debate at Mindshare and coming across lots of interesting stuff, most of which I’ll post after. in the meantime one interesting film that doesn’t quite sit with our case and I don’t think will hurt our argument if i share, plots the recent growth of mobile and makes predictions on where it’s all going:
if the future is anywhere near this then it has huge implications for mobile brands and the following highlights the predicament that major manufactures currently find themselves in compared to apple:
Traces of Hope
A couple of nice examples from the BBC on technology (and ad techniques) being put to great use by chariities.
‘Traces of hope’ is a new ARG from the British Red Cross (with the writers of Kate Modern and Enable Interactve) were you have to help Joseph, a refugee in wartorn Northern Uganda, find his mother. The game works to raise awareness of the conflict, the work the Red Cross does to reconnect families separated by conflict, and drives home how individuals can make a difference by actively getting involved. I’ve signed up to the game and am excited to see how it plays out.
And an interesting article on the UN and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership funded initiative that uses an open source mobile platform to help control the outbreak of polio and other diseases in Kenya.
branded utility through mobile apps
The growth in the development of mobile applications is throwing up some useful (and lots of not very useful) ideas for how we can/will integrate our mobiles even further with our daily lives.
Some things that have been talked about for years, like paying for car parking via your mobile, are now finally a reality in places like Edinburgh. And the integration of GPS adds another interesting dimension – from geo-tagging locations to locating the proximity of friends, buses or even satalites overhead.
Even applications like the one that turns the iphone into a metronome shows the diversity and simplicity of utility that the humble mobile phone can hold.
Add this to the existing inbuilt functionality such as cameras and mp3 players and the role our phones will play in our lives extends further and further.
I can now be listening to the radio (on my phone or not) and through an app I can identify the track I’m listening to, purchase it and download it to the music collection on my handset.
Or I can take a picture, add some text and send a personalised postcard to my friends from my phone. Whilst not necessarily groundbreaking, this does highlight a nicely joined up use of the functions already on my phone.
What’s interesting is that none of this development is coming from brands, yet. It is being fostered by the likes of Google and Vodafone but it must only be a matter of time before agencies and developers come together so something like the mobile postcard app comes from a Kodak.
If branded utility is the next big thing in marketing – there is a lot of potential utility but few brands are yet to be involved.
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