Mobile Tools for Producers: Do You Need an App?
In a NATPE 2010 panel sponsored by the Producers Guild of America and its New Media Committee and Mobile Committee, moderator and producer John Heinsen of Bunnygraph Entertainment and a 
group of panelists talked turkey about some of the real life tools required to produce mobile content. The first panelist, Brian Gratch, CEO of Sixteen30, talked about the many ways that content owners working with brands create mobile promotions. “Today it seems like a complicated value chain but there are players involved that simplify that for you,” he said. “There is a way to make these great ideas in promotion interactive to happen today.”
Heinsen, noting that smart phone penetration is exploding, said that with greater penetration of these devices, we’ll be seeing more rich media. He also brought up the notion of transmedia. “That’s the future ,” he said. “The audience will engage you wherever they live. And this [mobile] is a bridge to that.”
From Chicago-based ViralMesh, a mobile marketing platform enabling clients to add 2D barcodes, picture or text tags to any object, Aamer Ghaffar addressed mobile marketing and content. “The challenge we address today is the majority of the content out there isn’t created for mobile, ” Aamer Ghaffar said. “Make a 30 second trailer or 2 minute video of content for mobile, and it’s not a great user experience. That’s one of the biggest pain points. If I have to look at the last couple of years, consumers have been interacting more with promotional [material] than content.” He described ViralMesh’s Snap& Send product, in which the consumer takes a snap of an image and then can send it. “Snap&Send is the future,” said Heinsen. “Imagine a 3D barcode on your movie poster, so if you grab that code, you can get a trailer and then send it to your friends or post it on various sites.” ViralMesh also created a mobile-enabled billboard in Chicago to reach out to the fan base of musician Kanye West. “If the consumer sends in a picture or text, they could enroll to get free tickets or play a video,” said Ghaffar “We ran it for 45 days and we got an almost 17 percent click-through rate.”
GPS-enabled cell phones will also open up a wide variety of marketing and content creation strategies said Jeff Knowlton who has three examples of how this works on his website. “We know where you are within 15 feet,” he said. “So we can deliver content to your location.” How does a producer create content using GPS capabilities? “First, you have to think about how GPS will help you,” said Knowlton. “Take The Sopranos. People want to go to New Jersey and see all the locations where it’s shot. If you’re David Chase, you own the content. Contact me and I can put that in a form that would fit on mobile and you could sell The Sopranos Tour for $10. When people hit the street corner where a specific scene was shot, the phone’s GPS knows, the screen pops up and you’ll see the TV segment that was shot right there, while you’re in that physical space.”GPS hotspots are a 12 to 14-foot square. “Once you walk into that square, the playback of media is triggered,” said Knowlton.
Digital marketing consultant Miguel Gonzalez stressed that counting clicks is not a useful way to add up ROI (return on investment). “Mobile is the enabling device constantly in the possesstion of every consumer,” he said. “Instead of counting clicks, look at engagement metrics to measure how you’re doing in the marketplace.” The notion of “Depth on Demand” comes from that observation. “It’s no longer thinking of ‘I have a property I have to drive consumers to’,” he said. “Consumers are in a variety of consumption modes, from superficial to deep, where they want to enage interactively. The post-purchase experience is even more valuable as Social Media and Word of Mouth spread. Therefore atomize and distribute the content as “social media objects” in advertising units, landing pages, microsites, sponsored content modules, viral streaming videos, apps and more. And put ‘share this’ on everything. By sharing it, they’re becoming the proponents of the content. And that’s the most persuasive form of marketing.”
Heinsen said that many people ask him if they need to get an app. “People know there are 100,000s of apps for the iPhone,” he said. “We’re going to be at $6 billion worldwide spent on apps by 2010. Is creating an app a way to get your feet wet?” Aamer answered with a resounding yes. “The question boils down to what is the right price to pay,” he said. “More and more of our clients say they want an app for iPhone, Blackberry and Droid. That may be an investment that might not get approved. Instead, what we’ve implemented successfully is a mobile website that has a short code that can be submitted to the Apple app store, and downloaded as a short code on the consumer’s phone. The days are gone in which the app is a novelty.”
Heinsen said a WAP site might be the best way to go. “Morgan Stanley said the explosion of mobile web really isn’t the future,” he said. “As everything converges and this notion of transmedia comes into play, as broadcast viewers go to the web and phones get better, a WAP site is designed to be seamless in the mobile space.”
Gonzalez said that from a promotion point of view, apps can be effective as a social media object. But with a caveat. “The creative team needs to come up with i,” he said. “It isn’t just a repurposing on your existing content. It actually has something useful and relevant around the property, engaging the property. Keep in mind that there are studies that the majority of apps are downloaded, played with a few times and then abandoned. Instead of seeing that as a liability, because it’s temporary, the WAP site becomes the more permanent, resource-full destination. The app can be a very powerful social media object; it’s a disposal promotional item that can offer entertainment, fun and is very shareable.”
Gratch said his company will build apps when the big brands ask for them. “But you need to be realistic,” he said. “There is no ROI from an app. Maybe 20,000 people will download it, and your CEO will be happy. It’s cool to see stuff running on an iPhone. But if you take a look at people in Norman, Oklahoma, there aren’t a lot of iPhones or smart phones. If you want to engage on a mobile point of view, and want to engage with people out of major urban areas, you need a bigger palette. So, apps are important thing to do, but the other part, where we start to engage people is to utilize what everyone does on the phone: talk. How about having the talent of the show make wake-up calls to fans. Or maybe we have a phone call, and at the end you can press 1 to be connected to a call center. We have voice engagement, a texting element. This sounds like we’re starting at the bare basics, but to get the most number of people engaged at a level where it’ll be a behavior they’re comfortable with and doesn’t take a lot of money to get involved, [this is it].”
“Baby steps are the way to go,” agreed ViralMesh’s Ghaffar. Gonzalez said that if you build an ad space on mobile with a video that says click here, you’ll get very few clicks. “But if you have the simplicity of asking the consumer to send us a text and we’ll send you someting back, then you get a follow up message that continues the conversation, to get a ring tone, then next, see an exlcusive video made for the mobile screen,” he said. “Then you’re going deep, bringing the consumer with you. This is what the Kanye West mobile campaign did.”
Gratch noted another campaign, for NASCAR. “You sign up with Coors Lite, you get to know who’s qualifying and winning the races,” he said. “At the end of the TV spots, we’d tell viewers to text a word to a short code, and we got thousands of NASCAR fans. On a weekly basis, you’d get more information, the names, as a text message and then a phone call. People looked forward to their message…and it was from a brand.”
The panelists all suggested that producers adjust their expectations of what they’ll be able to get from mobile content. “It’s not about marketing or production dollars,” said Heinsen. “Joss Whedon doesn’t care about monetization of his mobile content. He knows it is a tool of immense reach.” Just as productions think about DVD extras from the very beginning of production, said Gonzalez, producers now have to think, in a careful and premeditated way, about creating content for the web and mobile.
Tags: 2D barcodes, 3D barcodes, app, Bunnygraph Productions., GPS hotspots, GPS-enabled cell phones, iPhone, Kanye West mobile campaign, mobile content, mobile marketing platform, mobile promotions, mobile video, mobile website, mobile-enabled billboard, NASCAR mobile campaign, NATPE 2010, New Media Committee, PGA, Producers Guild of America, Sixteen30, smart phones, Snap&Send, transmedia, ViralMesh, WAP site
This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 10:07 am and is filed under Advertising/Marketing, Content, Devices, Home Feature, Monetizing Mobile.
