There are a number of options available for businesses to effectively engage their audience, it may be creating a mobile site, developing a mobile application, utilizing social networks and lets not forget about SMS (text messaging) campaigns. To effectively reach a target audience it may require using a combination of these things, one of the most important ingredients in the recipe for Mobile Marketing success is the SMS campaign. Many businesses often overlook this resource, as they would rather create mobile sites and mobile applications since the emergence of the smartphone.

As recently as November 2011, ComScore estimated that 5.3 billion people worldwide own a mobile device, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older. The CTIA (International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications Industry) reported that 3-5 billion text messages are sent and received each year and 97% of those messages are opened.  So while mobile applications and websites get all the hype, the SMS campaign may be the best resource in reaching a target audience. Of course mobile sites and applications are great resources, but once again it’s all about choosing the right ingredients in the recipe for Mobile Marketing success.

Winning Entry:

“Sometimes talk to my phone (Siri) in my sleep and ask her if the 49ers will win the Superbowl. Apparently I also think she’s psychic.” -Griselda

Runners Up:

“Not living in the moment. When random things happen, instead of experiencing them, I’m too busy texting, tweeting, facebooking, taking pics of or video recording them! -Neesha

“Wherever I go with friends, going out an about. I must check in at every location with Facebook. I feel like there are people on my friends list that could relate to every location that I go to or even learn about a new place because of my check in which is awesome.” – Askan

“Texting while driving, saying to myself that I will not text while driving, then texting while driving, then not texting and then texting again and stopping when a police car pulls along side of me.” -Eric

Still reading? Well your in luck, we have more tickets! The next ticket giveaway is for this Wednesday January 18th. The Clippers take on the Dallas Mavericks at 7:30 pm. As always, one simple questions:

What is the most compelling mobile marketing statistic that you have come across in 2012?

Please include your reference and email all entries to tyler@textopoly.com. Be sure to check out our Facebook for the latest updates!

]]> http://www.textopoly.com/blog/2012/01/winner-announcement-clippers-vs-nets-tickets/feed/ 0 http://www.textopoly.com/blog/2012/01/winner-announcement-clippers-vs-lakers-tickets/ http://www.textopoly.com/blog/2012/01/winner-announcement-clippers-vs-lakers-tickets/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:31:59 +0000 Corey http://www.textopoly.com/blog/?p=1573 Recently we started a new trend at Textopoly, giving away free Clippers tickets. This week was our first give away and to win we asked one simple question: If you could rename SIRI what would you name her/him? After many interesting and quirky entries we picked our winner as well as listed some of our favorite entries!

Winner: Paul Schmidt from BLUE C!
His Siri Rename: Sophia aka Simply Outstanding Personal Helper In A’crunch.

Textopoly Favorites:
-Cider: Because that is what happens when you squeeze an apple real tight
-BOB: Battery Operated Buddy
-Steve: Just so we’d all have a little bit of Steve Jobs every day
-Arta: Always ready to Answer
-Alfred: The butler from Batman

Our next ticket give away is for this coming Monday January 16, 2012, The Clippers take on the New Jersey Nets at 12:30pm. Our question this time around is:

What is your worst mobile phone habit and why?

As usual please email all responses to tyler@textopoly.com and keep an eye on our Facebook for updates, we look forward to all the creative entries!

If you could rename SIRI what would you name her/him?

Please email your best response to tyler@textopoly.com, a winner will be selected Friday at noon! Be sure to “Like” us and check out our blog (http://www.textopoly.com/blog/), we will be giving away more tickets & apparel throughout the coming months!

Variety Magazine hosts its first ever Entertainment Apps conference from 8:30am – 6:30pm on Thursday, December 1^st, 2011 at the Sofitel Hotel Los Angeles.

Naushad Huda, CEO of Textopoly has been invited to speak at the conference, which features other entertainment industry mobile experts like Elias Plishner, SVP Worldwide Digital Media, Sony Pictures Worldwide Marketing and Distribution, T.J. Marchetti, SVP, Digital, Disney, Chris Hewish, Head of Global Interactive, DreamWorks Animation, Ted Hong, CMO, Fandango, Alex Barkaloff, Executive Producer, Lionsgate, and many more leaders in the space.  Produced by Concurrent Media, the event will provide insights on how media and entertainment companies are using apps to distribute premium content, enhance viewer engagement and create new revenue opportunities.

The conference will cover topics such as movie distribution via social-networking platforms, social viewing apps for movies and TV and monetization strategies.  Naushad will speak about HTML5 vs. Native Apps; more specifically, answering questions such as: Will HTML5 really allow web-based apps to do everything that iOS and Android apps can do? This panel will focus on the advantages/downsides of developing entertainment-oriented apps in HTML 5 vs. native platforms. How quickly are media companies shifting focus from proprietary platforms to HTML 5? Where should developers focus their resources?

Please join us for this exciting and unprecedented event, and share this note with your friends and colleagues.   Registration is accessible by this link – click here.

Variety Magazine Entertainment Conference

Naushad was invited by Tech Coast Angeles to a live 1 hour interview (Video!) and Q&A session hosted by Barbara Seymour on Vokle to share his insights on how to develop a mobile strategy. Those who watched the session live had the chance to ask, and have answered, mobile strategy questions such as:

1. What can you tell us about the adoption of Mobile Tech?
2. What are the Pro’s and Con’s of outsourcing mobile development?
3. What features can be added to a mobile app to make it stand out?
4. When building a new mobile app: when should we do a web app, when should we do a native app?
5. What is the hottest mobile marketing trend?

Of the 1,300 U.S. consumers that participated in the InsightExpress study, 67% of men and 54% of women, said they would reach for their mobile device before asking a salesperson for help. With the technology to check prices, find deals and locate out-of-stock items at other locations these stats are not too surprising. According to Joy Liuzzo, Vice President, Director, mobile research at InsightExpress, retailers that are not connecting with consumers this holiday season could leave millions on the table. Another piece of interesting information is that half of those who participated in the survey intend on spending more that a few hundred dollars on holiday gifts, and 46% said they would use their phone to shop throughout the holiday season.

With mobile technology constantly changing, waiting in those long lines outside retail locations will soon be a thing of the past.

Happy Holidays!

Without music I can’t get through the day without going insane. Pandora’s awesome mobile app allows me to stream songs directly into the palm of my hand via smartphone. For a consumer, Pandora offers a large selection of artists, easy interface, and high quality music. Not to mention the app is completely free. However, for marketers and big brands alike Pandora is a goldmine of opportunities. This ”fun app” is one of the best ways to bolster brand awareness, engage consumers, and increases fiscal results.

According to Luxury Marketing Pandora’s traffic is 65% mobile device based and allows targeting based upon listening preferences, making Mobile Banner Ad’s within the app the ideal place for big brands to allocate their marketing efforts. Pandora is by no means a “traditional” advertising channel and there are plenty of big brands that are looking for ways to break the mold of “old school marketing”. Luxury brand Nordstrom’s is one such big brand. The company aims to drive consumers to stores via banner ads that offer a store locater with directions.

Pandora takes the guess work out of the question “where is my target audience”. Within the app, consumer demographics can be segregated by a stations genre ensuring a brand will have a higher ROI per advertisement. For instance, a Pandora station for “Lady GaGa” is bound to have listeners who value high fashion, high culture, and clothes that are trendy. Nordstrom’s placed banner ads on that station alone to target the fashion guru’s of the world. The combination of Pandora and mobile banner ad’s is a marketing tool that is down right effective. In the fiscal year of 2011, Pandora has 23 million active users and is projected to grow 21 percent annually and reach 159 million active listeners worldwide by fiscal 2021 according to Morgan Stanley analyst Scott Devitt. Pandora is so successful that is gaining more consumers per year than sales staff. With such a growth in mobile music, mobile marketers need to start incorporating banner advertising with Pandora to engage consumers. In the near future QR codes will die, but Mobile banner ads are here to stay.

Long Live the Mobile Banner Ad!

QR Code Example to Non-Mobile Web

Yes it’s a dramatic title but the widespread muscle-memory misuse of QR codes by an overwhelming majority of advertisers in print is like a slow death to those of us who live & breath mobile.  Seems like every time I pick up a newspaper, a magazine or walk by any printed material there is a QR code – starring at me, poking at me, taunting me to scan it.  After all, I should scan it; I’m in mobile! As I pull out my phone and slide it ‘on’, and slowly move my finger towards the QR scanning app there is a part of me that braces for disappointment. It brings back memories of going to Toys R Us as a kid hoping that as we walk by the shiny bikes and I ask my parents for a bike that today they would say yes. . . as I scan this QR code I’m hoping that I’ll be interacting with a mobile optimized landing page with features that I can interact with. Sadly, just as when I was a kid, I didn’t get the experience of that shiny bike but instead new diapers. And as I scan yet another QR code, the experience is similar to what a diaper is made to hold – shit.

I wonder if it’s the advertiser, their agency or the pesky ad-sales rep at the publication who didn’t think to warn the advertiser before they unleash these terrible experiences onto the world. If a consumer is made to use his mobile device to gain information about your brand, and when he uses his mobile device to participate in a mobile tactic (the QR code) then he should get a – duh! – mobile experience! He doesn’t want to zoom and scroll all over the crap experience you gave him. He doesn’t want to try and figure out where on your massive site he should be looking as he browses on the 4 inch screen. And yes, he will hate on your brand for making him go through this frustration!

Overall there is a tear in the thin strategic fabric. There is a gap in knowledge about how to use the QR tactic properly and give the consumer a complete mobile experience. This gap sometimes extends to ‘mobile’ as a whole. Mobile encompasses many tactical solutions such as QR, AR, Mobile Web, Apps, SMS, etc and each tactic should be thought through not only for the mobile experience but also how to harmoniously have it work with other digital and traditional strategies.

I’m done with scanning QR codes. Oh, and when NFS hits the streets the same rule applies – give the consumer on mobile a mobile experience not a desktop one!

“HTML5 enables Textopoly to translate the hyper creative concepts of our imagination into engaging and instantly immersive mobile experiences, blurring the line between advertising and entertainment,” says Textopoly CEO Naushad Huda.

Yamaha HTML5 Animated Mobilesite

Yeah, we’re pretty F*&#! good

Check out the Release: http://leep.me/xI

Check out the site yourself on your iOS or Android handheld: www.yamahaboats.com

Yamaha HTML5 Animated Mobile Site – Pop-up Window!

I like Clear Wireless. For those who don’t know what Clear Wireless is, it’s an ISP that uses 4G to connect you to the Internet. It’s just the data plan portion of your cell phone plan. When you order Clear you get a ‘modem’ that you just plug in for power, and that modem is now the hotspot to which you can connect several devices for fast internet all through the 4G wireless network! We have one as a backup at the office and I generally will surf on 7mps down. Not bad for $40 a month.

I think giving consumers a choice on who they use for an ISP in their home or office is awesome. It’s a grim scenario when I hear that only X or only Y serves my area and I have to use them – still not sure how that still works. Must be an old Ma’ Bell trick!

The question still remains in my mind on why Cox didn’t go down the Clear (no pun intended) route of just selling internet connectivity via wireless networks when it was part of the conglomerate that won the spectrum auction for $2b+ back in 2006? (To jog your memory: http://leep.me/xx)  - Instead Cox decided to become a mobile wireless carrier. . .we’ve seen how this plays out (see many MVNOs from the last decade).

(After I wrote this an interesting article was published by PC Magazine about ISPs offering $10 a month internet services to those who have at least one child in the Free School Lunch Program.)

I asked a good friend of mine, a veteran in the mobile space (@james_monaghan http://twitter.com/james_monaghan) to tell me in how to best describe HTML5. James, being the clever Englishman that he is replies that HTML5 is a “Significant milestone in the maturation of mobile web application delivery.” One of our own top developers (Keivan!) had a similar sentiment and was kind enough to share with me an awesome presentation he found – the presentation itself is in HTML5 (!) so please view it on Firefox, Safari or Chrome – our good friends at Microsoft are a bit behind. http://slides.html5rocks.com/

Also, to see some HTML5 hotness in action check out some Textopoly work in HTML5 that will blow your mind:

http://bit.ly/iDPOQj

http://leep.me/v2

Enjoy – and give us a ring to talk about Rich Media & HTML5 – we’re on it!

All data, stats, and charts credited eMarketer.com

You may be wondering, what exactly do those old folk use mobile phones for? Thanks to the Pew Research Center’s dedicated research we have all the answers.

Go ahead and take a look at the chart below, enjoy!

The most common uses for mobile internet in Japan are accessing email, weather information and using search functionality. As the adoption of Android and the Apple iOS continues to grow exponentially year over year it will be interesting to see what the Japanese mobile internet trends occur. Can anyone say Angry Birds in Japanese?

(Post by Tyler Woodward, our crackerjack Intern: tyler[at]textopoly[dot]com, thanks buddy!)

(Santa Ana)—Santa Ana College (SAC) has launched a new mobile website that offers easy access from any smartphone. When a student or prospective student accesses www.sac.edu from his or her smartphone, the site automatically redirects the browser to the new mobile site.

“We are excited to embrace this new technology,” said Norm Fujimoto, vice president of academic affairs at Santa Ana College. “Our students and would be students are constantly accessing information through their mobile devices and we want to satisfy their needs for quick and simply navigated information about the college.”

The SAC mobile site was developed through a partnership with Santa Ana College, Textopoly, Inc., and its higher education innovation group—Republic of Digital. The mobile site evolved through the collaborative efforts of the Republic of Digital team, student intern Andrew O’Melia and the SAC Web Committee.

Since 2007, O’Melia has been enrolled part-time in the college’s digital media program. With 12 years experience as a graphic designer, he is working on his associate degree with plans to transfer to a four-year university.

During his three-month internship, O’Melia helped design the mobile site’s user interface elements and the graphics for the header bar. Textopoly and Republic of Digital’s, internship program helped incorporate a real-world project into an invaluable experience for O’Melia.  He was front and center when the final designs were presented by the Republic of Digital team to the clients—members of the SAC Web Committee.

“Since working on the SAC mobile site, I’ve really fallen in love with the process of designing and developing interactive media,” said O’Melia. “It’s not something I could have learned in the classroom and I’m now working as creative director with two application development companies.”

The mobile site features quick access to many of the most popular links on www.sac.edu,

including a campus map Google API, phone directory, class schedules, Webadvisor, library information, safety and security guidelines, continuing education information, counseling scheduling, help and frequently asked questions, plus ‘click to call’ phone numbers and links to the college’s Twitter and Facebook pages.

“It’s vital to think about a mobile site as not a simple shrunken version of the desktop site, but instead to wrap strategy and genuine insight around the build of the mobile site from the perspective of the user,” said Naushad Huda, CEO of Textopoly.

The site is compatible with mobile browsers found on a range of devices, including Android, iPhone, iPod, iPad, and BlackBerry. Since the mobile site has gone live, Android devices and iPhones top the list of devices accessing the new site.

According to Morgan Stanley, the volume of mobile users will outstrip the number of desktop Internet users by 2014. According to a report by Gomez, 52 percent of consumers are unlikely to return to a website they had trouble accessing by phone. What is even worse—40 percent said they would likely visit a competitor’s website instead.

About the Rancho Santiago Community College District

The mission of the Rancho Santiago Community College District (RSCCD) is to respond to the educational needs of an ever-changing community and to provide programs and services that reflect academic excellence.  Santa Ana College and Santiago Canyon College are public community colleges of RSCCD, which serve the residents of Anaheim Hills, East Garden Grove, Irvine, Orange, Santa Ana, Tustin and Villa Park.  Both colleges provide education for academic transfer and careers, courses for personal and professional development, customized training for business and industry, and programs to train nurses, firefighters and law enforcement personnel.

About Republic of Digital & Textopoly, Inc.

Textopoly is a multi-award winning mobile marketing and advertising agency that concepts and executes customized campaigns for brands and agencies. Whether it is through SMS, the mobile Internet, Mobile Media or Apps, they bring the brand straight to the users. Textopoly has worked with brands including Yamaha, Google/Admob, Microsoft Advertising, Paramount Studios, Bluefly, Rutgers University, Kikkoman, NBC, Sports Club of LA and many more.

Republic of Digital is a higher education focused innovation group within Textopoly whose focus is to partner with educational institutions and bring next generation mobile strategies & solutions to better interact and communicate with their constituents. Visit ROD at www.republicofdigital.com.

Santa Ana College Mobile Site

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/08/02/no-comment-angry-birds-in-convenient-bra-form/

So if a man sees this item in an intimate moment does that mean a ‘red light’!?

Television has long ago left our Plasma screens and creeped into laptops, desktops, and different media players. And now, it is making the transition to mobile. Of course, sinking into your favorite chair with an ice cold beer and leaning back to watch your favorite shows on a huge screen is a luxury to be treasured. But being able to watch an episode of How I Met Your Mother while waiting in a doctor’s office instead of flipping through a 5 year old copy of Home Living might just be the next best thing.

If TV comes to mobile on a wider spectrum, making mobile an even more prevalent part of our everyday lives, what do you think the impact will be on the mobile advertising industry? Let us know!

How? The basic process is:

1. Download an application called Astro File (or similar apps);

2. Download an application called 4shared (or going to 4shared website);

3. Search/download android apps from 4shared;

4. Use Astro File to database the files;

5. The phone installs the downloaded files.

(Visual tutorial at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8u5slHSSfU.)

Anyone who can download an application can hack the entire Android market place. This is clearly a red flag that the marketplace is too open. If these applications gain popularity (which, they are bound to), there will be no incentive for developers to develop paid applications for the Android OS. Beyond free apps, an open marketplace is a great marketplace for viruses. So, Android, where’s the regulation?

Michael here: Just thought I’d chime in with another viewpoint. The iPhone, with all it’s restrictions and walled gardens, isn’t much different. A jailbroken phone can easily download any app in the App Store, free of charge, at the touch of a button. iOS developers are also reporting extremely high piracy rates. Some have seen rates as high as 90%. Clearly a closed and regulated store isn’t the solution. I think at some point we’re going to have to accept that as long as copyright laws exist, pirates will find ways to break them.

Michael has a great point. So what do you guys think – should developers focus on restrictions or accept that rules are meant to be hacked?