Plastic Mobile Agency’s Client Portal

For those of you looking for our client portal, it has been upgraded and moved. It now lives on it’s own domain here: Plastic Mobile Agency’s client portal.  Once we relaunch our redesigned website you will be able to access it through the our homepage.

“Plastic wants to be Your Mobile Agency” is a new tag line that we’re considering for our upcoming rebranding efforts.  As a part of these efforts we’ve picked up the domain name: YourMobileAgency.com and contemplating moving over to this new domain.

For now we’ve got both of them in place but lookout for some interesting changes coming soon along with our new website.

Plastic is looking for talented developers to join our team. Currently, we’ve got two positions open:

1. PHP developer
2. C/C++ developer with OpenGL experience

If you want to find out more about the openings please contact us.

It seems like a no-brainer to anyone who has even studied a day of marketing in their life:  If you can directly target a specific individual at a specific time, you are light years ahead of what is currently being done in advertising with direct mailers.

Direct mailers have been around for many years and I am sure the first man (whoever he may have been) to discover the power of sending communication about a brand or a product to a person’s sacred place of residence directly didn’t realize the impact of the discovery for so many years to come.  And why wouldn’t it be great to send your brand to someones house?

Here is why:  That may have worked in those days when dad owned the house and mom owned the kitchen and mom probably received the mail.  Who receives the mail today?  Dad goes to work, mom goes to work, kids come home sometimes but they definitely don’t check the mail and if they did they would dismiss anything in the mail box because their phone would probably vibrate with a text message in their pocket at that exact moment.

So who are we sending our messages and communications to?  We don’t know, but the direct mail guys wont tell you that.  They will give you some fancy statistics about “between 25-56″ and income level of “30,000-80,000″ and you are supposed to make serious business decisions on those kind of statistics.

We are past those days and we are slowly coming to this realization.  Why would I send a direct mail piece if I can target who I send to and when they may recieve it.  I am talking about mobile marketing and communication with customers on the go.  Michael Becker, vice president of mobile strategy at iLoop stated -“Consider this – the mobile phone number is a unique, personal, identifier,” he said. “One is not simply sending a direct marketing message to someone’s house, email account or place of business when practicing direct mobile marketing. Rather, one, when employing direct mobile marketing practices, is engaging an individual directly, literally, wherever the individual may be in the world” .  iLoop, a mobile company has joined forces with direct mailer Harte-Hanks to offer their clients the advantages of communication via the mobile channel.

We (Plastic The Mobile Agency) like to say that you are solving three very important questions when you pursue mobile initiatives- The Where, The When and The Who….

I am always pleased when I hear people say it is the year of the mobile.

See when you have been in the mobile industry for several years, you come to hear the phrase “it is the year of the mobile” year after year and each time with more conviction.  The first time I heard it, a big smirk came across my face and I thought to myself that I must be brilliant because I am at the centre of one of the most exciting technological eras and like a ticking time bomb we are all waiting to see and enjoy its benefits.   Upon hearing this phrase several time not only did the novelty wear off so did my belief in whether “this really was the year of the mobile” .  I mean how many years can we claim as the year of the mobile and when do we know that it has come and gone.

Here is how I look at it.  The year of the mobile is not 2009, nor was it 2008 or 2007.  I don’t even think it will be 2010.  I don’t say this because I am a pessimist and don’t believe in mobile technology but rather I am a true believer that mobile technology is an integral part of our  lives moving forward.  What do I mean by this?  Well here is how I see it-Mobile technology is not the next Hotmail or Yahoo, its not Facebook or  Youtube and its definitely not Twitter.  Its not a fad and it wont go away, its here to stay and become deeply embedded  in our everyday routines.  To me its like saying this is the year of the “AUTOMOBILE”….doesn’t that sounds absurd….every year is the year of the automobile. Moving forward, every year will be the year of the mobile, but we will have new makes and models, accessories and such  to keep the industry afloat.

An interesting article on Mobile Marketer about a BMW campaign in Germany really caught my attention today.

I read about many different mobile initiatives around the world and this one specifically caught my attention for one specific quote ” We did much more fancy things but we figured out that the more fancy an application is, the less traffic we get,” said Mark Mielau, head of digital media at BMW Germany.  The reason I find this particularly interesting is that in Germany and with the BMW campaign, going back-to-the-basics of mobile is going with an campaign that users MMS and asks the users to interact with multimedia via their mobile phone.  As basic as this may seem to many throughout the world, MMS and multimedia on mobile phones is a new area to Canadians.  Adoption is still low and many mobile users do not yet know how to send or receive MMS communication.

A campaign such as the one by BMW in Germany may not have the desired results in Canada due to the late adoption of MMS.   For us here, going back-to-the-basics is using SMS and texting campaigns.  This can be highly lucrative for marketers if targeted appropriately.  Further, marketers have the ability to build mobile SMS communities so that future loyalty and communication could be routed to customers via their mobile phones.  The use of SMS is more readily understood and adopted than more “Fancy” campaigns using web and mobile applications at the current time.  Mobile web and applications and more “Fancy” mobile initiatives are not off the radar however and in fact they are on the horizon…..it’s just a matter of time before mobile users adopt these technologies and take full advantage of what the new mobile world has to offer.

Great ad and we’re all guilty of it.

Palm Pre has yet to release more information on their verison of the app store and the pricing model behind releasing Palm apps.

However, today they opened up to developers a preview of their Mojo SDK which can be accessed here. If you’ve got some time (approximately an hour) watch this O’Reilly Webcast with Mitch Allen, Palm’s Software CTO, about developing applications with their development kit. Also, they’ve got the first chapter of their webOS available for free. Enjoy.