Wednesday & Happy New Year: Top 3 Challenges & Opportunities in 2009

It's the last day of 2008 and everybody is looking back at the year and making predictions for the year ahead. While others are are doing this we will look ahead and focus on the actions required to meet the challenges and opportunities in 2009. The current financial climate is the most talked about challenge with the most common advice being to buckle up and sit still until things improve. For mobile marketing and services we disagree. Even with a financial meltdown there are still great opportunities ahead and that by tackling the challenges highlighted here the mobile marketing industry and in particular Golden Gekko will continue with high two digit growth in 2009.

1. From awareness to transactions
One of the great advantages of the Internet is that there is a direct measurable path from driving awareness of a product (banners, videos, interactive websites, etc) to generating transactions whether it is for travel, physical goods on Amazon or a subscription for an online magazine. Although the mobile may not be able to compete with e-commerce it has another even greater advantage. With the mobile we can link advertising through any media (TV, Radio, Web, Print, etc) to transactions using mobile coupons and ticketing on the high-street. The technology is already available in e.g. 50.000+ retailers across the UK and over 80% of all food food retailers in Sweden but currently not being used due to lack of awareness among marketers and training. Let's quit talking about how difficult it is and just make it happen. I know we will!

Action in 2009: Join together to make mobile transactions happen on a mass market scale across Europe.

2. Stop talking about measurements and start measuring
One of the key barriers to the success of mobile advertising highlighted by the industry in 2008 has been lack of standards for measuring. To tackle this the industry has set up various committees in the IAB, MMA and GSMA with the intention of establishing common metrics and standards. We think however that the attention to this issue is vastly overstated. The MMA has done a fantastic job establishing standards for mobile display advertising although additional improvements will be required over time. The challenges with mobile advertising metrics are almost exactly the same as for the Internet including targeting, impressions, click-through-rates, fraudulent behaviour, etc. Nor is the technology something unique or complicated. So, let's stop using metrics as an excuse for major brands and agencies not investing more money in mobile advertising and focus our energy on delivering great results and proving that they will generate great value with or without perfect metrics.

Action in 2009: Get on with it and deliver the ads, metrics and reports that the clients and partners are asking for.

3. Beyond the iPhone
2008 has certainly been the year of the iPhone and Golden Gekko has received at least one request for an iPhone application every day during the last couple of months despite the fact that the iPhone has limited reach and some major drawbacks in terms of functionality and more specifically distribution. The iPhone has been great for highlighting the need and opportunity for downloadable applications and the creative freedom that applications give brands, agencies and developers. The iPhone is however not the only phone that can deliver a great customer experience. Most of the 10.000+ iPhone applications available on iTunes could just as well have been delivered on the Nokia N95, Blackberry Bold, Samsung F480, Sony-Ericsson C905 or X1, Motorola RAZR2, LG Viewty, HTC Touch and of course the G1. The user experience on the iPhone is great with flashy graphics but the enabling technology for great mobile applications is available on almost any phone which means that mass market reach is possible today.

Action in 2009: Continue to develop great iPhone applications but also show that great applications and services can be delivered to almost any mobile phone enabling mass market reach today!


More challenges will follow as soon as we have tackled the ones above so expect a new top 3 list...

We look forward to a fantastic year for mobile marketing in 2009 and until then Happy New Year!

Golden Gekko

Monday: Key opportunities for mobile marketing in 2009 according to Mobile Marketer

The Mobile Marketer has a great article about the key opportunities for mobile marketing in 2009 looking sector by sector including retailers, car brands, media publishers, etc. The article is spot on in terms of highlighting the opportunities for brands and agencies to generate real bottom-line revenue through mobile marketing today.

For the full article visit: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/editorials/2328.html

Monday: Golden Gekko News Update

In the past couple of months we have launched lots of new exciting campaigns and partnerships. As a matter of fact Bena at Gomonews managed to announce some of them before we even did.

Here's just a few of them:

iPhone Chrimbell Application
Chrimbell turns your iPhone or iPod Touch into a christmas bell. The project was delivered to Ogilvy as there Christmas greeting card. You cand find it by searching for "chrimbell" on iTunes or by visiting http://tinyurl.com/6re6wa

iPhone Application Mockup Viewer
Golden Gekko has developed the iPhone Application Mockup Viewer that that enables us to deliver application mockups to clients in less than 24 hours. The service can also be used to produce customised slide shows.

Golden Gekko also provides a similar platform for all Java enabled mobile phones that has been used to produce more than 30 mockups for client demonstrations and user testing in 2008.

Contact us on sales@goldengekko.com for more information.

Disney Camp Rock
To promote the release of the movie Camp Rock II on DVD, Disney through Carat Mobile in Sweden asked Golden Gekko to produce a fun mobile application that turns almost any java enabled phone into a guitarr and music box. The application also includes wallpapers, ringtones and information about the movie. The app is available for free on http://camprock.golgek.mobi

Partnership with Tribal DDB
In September 2008 Tribal DDB partnered with Golden Gekko for mobile strategy development and production of mobile applications and sites. The partnership has already resulted in a couple
of undisclosed projects for Tribal DDB clients with a lot more to come.

Partnership with Nokia Interactive
In August 2008 Nokia Interactive (the mobile advertising unit of Nokia) partnered with Golden Gekko to support them with mobile website, application and widget development. The partnership has already resulted in over six projects including internal Nokia campaigns and external clients. More to follow about this in the new year.

Friday: Lynx campaign in the news

Mobiadnews has a great article and interview with Peter Sells at BBH about the Lynx campaign here.

http://www.mobiadnews.com/?p=3061

iPhone SDK, Android and Symbian creating more fragmentation

With over 300 million iphone applications downloaded to date and 200m+ applications downloaded every month across all mobile platforms the mobile application market has never been more interesting. But it's not all good. Despite all the positive impact from the iPhone and Android in the last year this is also causing majors headaches for the mobile services industry. Fragmentation is constantly increasing with more OS (iPhone, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Moblin Linux, Blackberry, etc), mobile browsers (Opera, Safari, Chrome, etc), application standards (Java, iPhone SDK, Symbian, Android SDK, Brew, 5+ different widget standards, etc). This will increase technical complexity, time to market, costs and potentially kill the chances of the industry really taking off. Imagine having to developing different versions of every software program for Dell, HP, Lenova, Toshiba, Asus, etc.

Developing 4 different OS versions of an application is possible although costly for most mobile services companies. Mobile game developers have dealt with this issue for some time with porting and testing costs making up as much as 80% of the total budgets which is bearable but certainly not profitable. The even bigger challenge however is maintaining, upgrading and supporting 5 different OS versions of an application that is in need of constant change. Unless you are Google, Facebook, MySpace or another business with 100m+ users this is simple not an option if you want to have a profitable business.

What are the options then unless you have unlimited resources for mobile application development?

A) Browser based solution only
Stick to a browser based solution and do everything you can to optimise the service over time and leverage new functionality such as script languages on the devices where this is possible. The negative side of this is that the user experience is always a little bit slow and the design and interaction capabilities very limited. It will very seldom give the user a WOW experience.

B) Automatic porting tools to support all platforms
There are a various porting tools available for porting from Java to Brew, iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android etc. These reduce the development efforts but not the optimising and Q&A work. However, they also substantially limit the use of native APIs and functionality across the platforms which means that the ported version is usually based on the most common denominator between the platforms, i.e. a bad compromise.

C) Java and iPhone versions
The only application development standard that works on a majority of handsets is Java Mobile Edition (J2ME). Java is currently available on over 90% of all devices in Europe, 80% in North America (includes packaging for Brew) and about 75% worldwide according to Strategy Analytics. The only multimedia enabled device that does not support Java today is the iPhone. Java definitely has its limitations but in terms of cost efficiency it is the only platform of choice.

In conclusion although the new platforms provide great new capabilities it is very unlikely that the development community will be able to support all of them. The decision on which platforms are used for development must be made on a case by case basis but in most instances Java is the only viable solution for downloadable applications in combination with standard XHTML for browser based services. Despite the competition from new and exciting platforms Java has a good chance to continue to be the platform of choice in the future.

We look forward to further debate on this subject!

Thursday: Best & Worse of the Mobile Web

Have you experienced a website that looks like this on your phone?

Check out the best and worst of the mobile web here by Mobithinking!

Direct link:
http://mobithinking.com/sites/mobithinking.com/files/mobiThinking_BestWorst.pdf

Monday: Almost Famous

Our Director of Business Development Michael Eriksson and Head of Sales in the UK Christine Linder presented at Digital Jam for Engine a couple of weeks ago. The presentation was captured on video and is now available on the web. The presentation provides a great introduction to mobile marketing using downloadable applications developed in Java or for the iPhone.

If you search for Golden Gekko on Youtube you'll find the videos but here are the links.

Episode 1:


Episode 2:


Episode 3:



With 25+ views so far they are not celebrities yet but please help them become famous!