Mel’s thoughts in Luxury Daily

Plastic President and co-founder, resident artist and one-woman mobile think-tank Melody Adhami was quoted by luxury daily again. This time, on the topic of mobile ads for luxury brands and the importance of a call to action.

When it comes to adding a call to action in Luxury brands mobile ads, Melody suggested, “I think a call to action can be very important and paramount to success, but in some instances I think great brands can get the message across loud and clear without saying a single word.”

“Luxury brands fall into the category of great brands that can get away with this.”

Of course sometimes a call to action is necessary, but mobile requires you to think within certain constraints.

“Because of mobile’s inherent screen limitations, brands need to pare down ads to the most basic essence and every pixel needs to be accounted for,” says Melody.

She also notes that, “Since words take up valuable screen real-estate, a call to action should be short, direct, clear and easy for the user to act on or follow.”

What are your thoughts on how major brands should be using the limited screen space of mobile? Let us know on Twitter @PlasticMobile

Plastic Mobile co-founder and COO, Melody Adhami, was quoted for a Luxury Daily article on Christie’s new iPad app.

For those of us not in the multi-million dollar real estate market, Christie’s is a publication listing high-end properties from around the world. They recently released a free iPad app. The app is a high quality digital magazine with excellent production values. It’s easy to read, navigate and comes loaded with breathtaking photos of some of the worlds most beautiful properties.

Anybody can tell you that an app with nice pictures is good, but Melody digs deeper, “Magazines are a very vivid, visual and tangible medium. When it comes to leisurely browsing, the kind that consumers have been trained to do for years with existing magazines, the simple added screen real estate of the iPad and other tablets allows users to garner more of this traditional experience.”

With print media increasingly struggling, Melody says that “if magazines are going to survive, they will simply have to embrace mobile devices.”

Do you think the iPad and other tablets are the future of magazines? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter @PlasticMobile

After months of preparation, planning and anticipation… Plastic Mobile has landed in Chicago for Forrester’s Digital Disruption conference.

Let’s not forget what got us here in the first place. Back in February Forrester wrote a report on the awesome UX of our Pizza Pizza app. Since then, we’ve been mentioned in their new book, “Outside In”. We can’t be more grateful of Forrester or prouder of our app.

Today we set up and tomorrow the fun begins. If you’re at Forrester too drop by and check out our Candy Shoppe booth!

Check out the report here and our Pizza Pizza app too.

Plastic Mobile Makes the MEA Finalist List - x2

The Mobile Excellence Awards, now in its fifth year, reveals  the 2012 finalists – and Plastic has not one but TWO nominations.

See a full list of finalists here.

MEA winners will be announced and honoured at the Ritz Carlton Marina Del Rey at Hollywood conference, Digital Hollywood, on October 17 in Marina Del Rey.

We’re confident our AIR MILES or Pizza Pizza mobile marvels will come out on top!

Are you as excited as we are? Tweet us @plasticmobile.

Today we wanted to give a shout out to an incredibly bright 17-year-old who has unknowingly done women across the globe a great service. Brittany Wenger from Florida, won the Grand Prize at Google’s annual Science Fair.

The best part? Her prize winning piece uses data and cloud computing to detect breast cancer with 99.1% accuracy. Called the, “Global Neural Cloud Service for Breast Cancer,” the product took her more than 600 hours to code.

Asked how she got involved in computer science, she said she just started exploring things she loved, like soccer. As one reporter wrote , “Wenger’s work with artificial neural networks (yeah, I know) started when she applied the computer programming methods to soccer, a sport she loves. Why not let a kid explore what he or she loves? They can always move onto cancer.”

A HUGE congrats to Brittany on her achievement!

So far in 2012, Plastic has been a big hit in the awards circle. We have won 10 awards, and the year is only half over!

Most recently, we won a Gold award for Pizza Pizza’s iPhone ordering app at the Applied Arts Interactive awards.

And the Creativity International Media and Inteactive Awards liked us so much, they gave us four awards:

• A Gold Award for Pizza Pizza iPhone ordering app
• A Gold Award for our AIR MILES app
• A Silver Award for our Team Buy consumer app
• An Honourable Mention for our Exchange Trade Fund app, ETF Central

And the Horizon Interactive Awards toasted us three times for:

• A Gold Award for the Pizza Pizza iPhone ordering app
• A Silver Award for the Royal LePage mobile website.
• And a Silver Award for our Exchange Trade Fund app, ETF Central

Pizza Pizza also brought in yet an additional two awards including a Silver from the Communicator Awards as well as an Official Honouree Award from the Webby’s this year.

We can’t wait to see what the second half of the year has in store for us, and we want to take a moment to send out a huge thanks to everyone involved in all our mobile solutions – we know it takes a village to raise a child, and we couldn’t have done it without you – you know who you are!

For my inaugural post as the resident Plastic Mobile intern, I’d like to focus on the eTail event we attended last week where I learned a number of interesting facts and stats about m-commerce.

First, and this one made my jaw-drop, a stat reported in late april by the eTailing Group in their annual merchant study, Making the Right Choices in a Connected World: Customer Experience Escalation: 85 percent of merchants say mobile commerce is a focus in 2012, up from 68 percent in 2011.

With nearly four out of five respondents suggesting that m-commerce is in their strategies, the mobile retail arena is about to get a lot more competitive. With so many merchants now simultaneously making the move to mobile, they will have to quickly develop effective mobile strategies that will also help engage their customers and bring their brands into the new world of mobile retail. I for one hope that the need for speed won’t hinder the need for quality initiatives.

Second, the Interactive Bureau reports in their study, Mobile Phone Shopping Diaries May 2012, that 73 percent of consumers say they have used their mobile phones in a store and that 40 percent of respondents said they want mobile ads to allow them to browse the brand’s broader product offering. This is interesting because it suggests that retailers can look to in-store mobile solutions and other alternatives to just mobile websites.

For instance, earlier this month Sephora went through a complete Digital Makeover. Their new and exciting cross-channel initiative includes a new mobile app with improved UX, sharper search capabilities, m-commerce enabled shopping and all the social network bells and whistles. Some of Sephora’s stores are seeing iOS devices being launched in-store to allow sales agents to speed up checkout times with mobile POSs. Other stores are implementing in-store iPads that provide extensive product information, style tips that customers can send to themselves via email and, of course, more social media integration.

There are definitely other brands implementing some fantastic m-commerce initiatives, but Sephora stood out to me as a leader because of the grand scale and quality of this mobile initiative.

Last, a recent study by Juniper Research estimates that mobile transaction volume will grow to $670 billion by 2015! I can’t wait to see which brands will follow Sephora’s fantastic example and make that prediction a reality.

So there you have it, a few interesting m-commerce stats and one very extensive and exciting new initiative to enhance consumers retail experiences.

Do you have your own mobile insights or thoughts on other great initiatives? Tweet us at @plasticmobile and let us know!

For more recent information on m-commerce, and to learn about the initiatives of other brands, I recommend some of the following articles:

Canada leads world in digital wallet tech, so what’s the holdup?
Key Traits of Mobile Commerce Leadership
The Future of Shopping is Mobile

eMarketer's Piece on our Mobile Wealth Study

We’ve been busier than usual here at Plastic Mobile (is that even possible?), with a whirlwind of events and releases. In the past few months,we have published the results of our highly anticipated Mobile Wealth Study in partnership with New York based Luxury Institute, participated in the Mobile Shopping Summit in San Diego, released the Forrester Research Pizza Pizza case study and headed back to Toronto to attend eTail Canada – we’re glad our media pals have been able to keep up!

Our Mobile Wealth Study has been particularly popular, catching the attention of both bloggers and major national publications. When we partnered with Luxury Institute to learn more about how wealthy consumers are using their mobile devices and luxury brand applications, we had no idea the results would ignite such widespread conversation. Check out what people are saying below.

Mobile Wealth Study in the News:

GigaOm, http://gigaom.com/mobile/redefining-luxury-for-a-mobile-world/

USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-04-15/cnbc-luxury-retailers-apps/54262362/1

Wall Street Journal, http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2012/04/03/wealthy-smartphone-users-like-angry-birds-and-facebook/

Fox Business, http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/2012/04/05/make-purchases-from-our-iphones-wed-rather-not-say-wealthy/

eMarketer, http://www.emarketer.com/Mobile/Article.aspx?R=1009033

Luxury Daily, http://www.luxurydaily.com/affluent-consumers-favor-brands-with-apps-study/

Mobile Marketing Magazine, http://m.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/mobilemarketing/i/article/targeting-rich-theres-app

Tech Vibes, http://www.techvibes.com/blog/wealthy-consumers-favour-luxury-brands-that-go-mobile-canadian-startup-discovers-2012-04-24