A Union of Print and Mobile

A recent InsightExpress study suggests that mobile and print would make a great team. The company found that mobile users are also print junkies: “Based on our findings, it’s clear that brands and retailers should be incorporating mobile into their print strategies,” said Joy Liuzzo, vice president and director at InsightExpress.

Print and Mobile, sitting in a tree...

Liuzzo goes on to say that there’s more to this relationship than just a little QR coding. There are a number of ways to strengthen this bond, including article archiving or sharing and information gathering. The company specifically focused on QR codes and user engagement, finding that smartphone owners who use their mobiles for six or more daily activities were also reading or subscribing to print publications. These users are a hot target for advertisers as they have diverse tastes extending even beyond their reading mediums to any number of lifestyle routines (eating, shopping, etc.). The study found that these people were also more inclined to connect with companies via their mobile devices. “The biggest surprise to me was with the segment of smartphone owners that do six or more activities on their phone every day and their print media consumption,” said Ms. Liuzzo. “This group is both subscribing to, and reading more, print materials than any of the other groups (smartphone or regular phone owners).”

According to our friends over at Mobile Marketer, InsightExpress then delved into an investigation of this market’s varying reading behaviours and discovered that magazines came out on top in terms of user engagement. For example, tearing out articles or tracking down a product mentioned in an article or ad.

Turns out, traditional print media isn’t out of the game just yet. It just needs to get wiser and learn a thing or two from it’s new young partner. From here, who knows where this dynamic duo can go? What do you think? Are print and mobile a match made in heaven? Tweet us your comments to @plasticmobile.

As we sat amongst our hacks/hackers peers and colleagues from the publishing world, we were giddy with anticipation to do a live demo our new platform Joomo. Joomo is an automated platform that enables anyone to create high-quality custom native mobile applications across all mobile devices. With a web-based studio you can create, edit, track and customize every aspect of your app, all for free.

When our host, Phillip Smith, told the audience that Plastic Mobile is going to build an application in the duration of our 8 minute presentation time slot, there were many skeptical faces in the crowd. Now I’m not going to toot the Joomo horn, and write about how unbelievably easy to use it is, or the incredibly engaging user experience, or how it’s simply visually stunning. And I’m certainly not going to get into the whole native back end discussion and the genius behind that, rather I’m just going to let you witness how Melody and Sep delivered as promised, and built an app for ’29 Secrets’ in approximately 5 minutes.

Warning: The quality of the video is not Oscar-worthy, but then again that’s usually how it is when something rare and awesome happens and we spontaneously try to capture it. Think of UFO videos-never great.

While consumers’ expectations of smartphones are rising everyday, the mobile industry hasn’t educated consumers about the limitations of mobile devices and this has led to idealistic expectations of mobile phones and mobile ads. A part of their unrealistic expectations is that smartphones can do just about anything and everything for them.

Before the Smartphone’s boom, most cell phone owners were satisfied with only clear voice calls, fast texting, and simple games. But times have changed and consumers have great expectations from their mobile devices; they want the best smartphones at the lowest possible prices. They demand more features, better performance, the coolest apps, and indirectly the best mobile ads.

The competition in mobile OS market is intense and bloody! Everywhere you go, you see Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, or Symbian devotees trying to make their friends switch or upgrade; marketers and advertisers are adding mobile to their strategy; manufacturers and app developers fight for increased market presence; wireless carriers try their best to attract more customers, and basically everyone in the mobile industry is fighting for more profit, higher market share, or stronger presence.

As a result of this hype, today more than ever before, mobile advertising is up swinging. Mobile advertising campaigns have become the key to making money with mobile marketing. This means that the opportunities for making money are endless, but the question is how can you turn mobile ad campaigns into successful mobile marketing that puts money in your pocket?

How to best turn mobile ads to dollars?

Cell phone adoption rates, especially smartphone adoption rate are rising everyday, so is the importance of mobile advertising; therefore, marketers should keep in mind the necessary qualities in creating successful mobile ads.

Marketers should also bring into consideration that many consumers are still less than thrilled about ads on this very personal device. In order to increase the usefulness of the channel, mobile marketers must cater the features and formats of their mobile ads to their consumer’s preferences. Meaning that they should understand not only do consumers expect mobile ads to inform, but also they expect the mobile ad to provide relevant information tailored to their preferences.

According to a survey from Yahoo! and Nielsen Company, being informative was the most important quality of mobile ads for a wide variety of products and services. Relevancy was a relatively close second in most categories. Respondents cared relatively little about the graphical and multimedia elements of the ads. This contrasts with research on iPad advertising, which has shown that tablet users pay more attention to the look and feel of the ads and care more about the colors.

According to the InsightExpress “Digital Consumer Portrait” published in 2010, the heaviest mobile users generally did not find mobile banners annoying, while full-page ads were seen less favorably.

Based on the research that has been done on mobile ad campaigns and our expertise in this arena, we recommend marketers to focus on relevant information for their mobile ad. A smartphone user’s satisfaction of mobile ads will only improve if the mobile industry releases flawless, informative, relevant mobile ads that truly offer excellent value and choice for the user.

As mobile ads are getting millions of clicks and eyeballs, it’s important to create an ad that meets users expectation. Time on a mobile ad with a brand is a great deal for a retailer; it is a very intimate experience exploring a brand on such a personal device; isn’t it?

MLB’s New York Yankees have expanded their reach to their consumers and is not running ad-supported SMS alerts.  Users can get news and scores and be updated about their favourite teams on their mobile phones and advertisers get to be right  there to reap the benefits.

Michael Spirito, vice president of business development & digital.  has quoted that “SMS alerts are something that we started doing as a way to provide enhanced value to our customers so that our viewers can get up-to-date scores and news from the Yes Network,”  “It’s an opportunity to extend our brand into the mobile universe, and we’ve seen it grow in popularity over time.

Although this is truly mobile, users need to first sign up online to both opt-in and also select their desired categories.   More and more we are seeing brands and companies bridging web and mobile to get a fully integrated campaign.
What is even more impressive is that as soon as updates are seen on the website, there is a great effort to get them onto SMS and to the subscribers.

Its speaks great deals when we see companies making great efforts to mobilize their contents. It speaks about the future of the mobile industry.

Plastic Mobile Agency is  based out of Toronto, Ontario and we offer brands and companies assistance in developing mobile strategies that suit their target goals.

Watching the television has somehow become a thing of the past for me.  I don’t have cable television and I am not usually interested in watching anything on TV unless its the talk of the town.

For instance, the Oscars.  I watch the oscars mainly because the rest of the North American world does and I will not be able to keep conversations for at least a week thereafter.  So I watched it this year…but on the internet on some not very legal site.  That is not the interesting part however.  Before I found the live broadcasted show, I ran into an interesting website that was based around the oscars and all people did was post twitter like comments about the oscars.  It was great for me because I hadn’t found the live televised site yet and I was hearing all about the winners, the clothing, the jokes and even the facial expressions.  The part that blew me away was that I even received comments about the ads that were being served.  In some cases, in a given time frame there was more then one ad since the web has no national boundaries and I was likely listening to an American and a Canadian ad being served.

I normally don’t find myself so interested in a particular forum but this was LIVE and it was exactly about the topic I was searching for.   It kept me occupied for at least the better part of an hour and I was so amused that people were in front of her television sets, fully engaged in what they were watching and they felt the need to share.   That was the first moment where I felt that advertising is about to change and in a big way.   We have been hearing all about it, in all the new media events and all the upcoming advertising trends…but this was the first time I truly saw it.

So what is advertising become and what is this change I speak about?  Well for one thing, the meaning of engagement can once and for all be defined.  Those people on that forum were truly engaged with the ads.  In fact so engaged, they felt the need to share it with others.  This is were we are headed and the growth of the mobile smartphone industry is going to take us there even faster.  Twitter-like applications will allow people to share their views about everything and ads will be there and will be ready to be discussed.  Only one challenge comes to mind and its not a  new one but with these trends the challenge is even greater.  The ability for the ads to be heard and to be discussed.  Advertisers will be more pressed to incorporate topics that will draw interest and discussions.  As difficult as this may seem, those that get the formula write will see numbers unparalleled.   Without national boundaries and without the limitations of time and space, an advertisers market becomes none other than the entire world.