BRANDING UNBOUND

Butterball's 'Turkey Text' Readies For Bird Day

Butterball's Turkey Text is in full swing as Thanksgiving approaches - and thank goodness for that.

The service, part of the 800# Turkey Talk effort that Butterball has been running for 29 years, is growing into new channels every year.

The Turkey Text, enables consumers to text the word "TURKEY" to 36888 to have turkey tips, thawing reminders, and cooking alerts sent straight to your mobile phone, has been around a few years now. There's even a mobile site and newer Twitter and Facebook interfaces. Can an iPhone app be far behind?

In my new book, THE ON-DEMAND BRAND, I look at the power of these mobile offerings in helping the brand reach out and service consumers in all new ways. Here is a product - a turkey - that becomes an on-demand service via mobile phone. In an age of mobile apps, these services will take on all new meaning and utility for both consumers and the brands they know and trust.

Read more here, here and here.

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Seasons (or Scary) Greetings: Mall Has Santa Sending SMS To Kids

Your kids may be writing old-school letters to Santa, but a Mall in the Minnesota area is having Santa send your kids text messages.

Before you pick up the mobile phone to call the police, read more: A mall called The Burnsville Center is working with Anchor Mobile Marketing to enable kids to sign up for (at a nominal fee) text messages from St. Nick. 

The missives will also include information on special events, mall hours, gift cards, movies and vide messages.

As Burnsville Center officials put it in a press release cited by Finance-Commerce.com: “Santa can now send children mobile phone text messages that he ‘cant w8 2 visit them xmas eve’ and tell them about his preparations for the big night via Web videos."

On second thought, go ahead and call the police.

Read more, here.

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Gartner Lists Top 10 Mobile App Trends for...2012

Not content to make the usual year end review or new year forecast, Gartner's already looking ahead to 2012.

Maybe it's the recession. Maybe it's the slow app adoption rate. For whatever reason, CIOL reports that Gartner's looking out past 2010 and 2011 to see what 2012 holds for mobile apps. The top 10 trends:

1. Money Transfer
2. Location-Based Services
3. Mobile Search
4. Mobile Browsing
5. Mobile Health Monitoring
6. Mobile Payment
7. Near Field Communication Services
8. Mobile Advertising
9. Mobile Instant Messaging
10. Mobile Music

 Some of this seems obvious (especially the money transfer and payment parts). But personally I think mobile advertising will have already hit a trough of disillusionment by then (mobile marketing's so much more powerful than that).

Gartner gets it right when it says, "The mobile channel will be used as part of larger advertising campaigns in various media, including TV, radio, print and outdoors." Just not in the way it means (as yet another ad delivery platform.) Instead, mobile will increasingly be used as an activation mechanism for responding to commercial messages we experience in those other media. There's a big difference.

The rest of the list is already here. Which means no great leap on any of this except for the mobile ad part. On that score, let's all hope Gartner is wrong.

Read more, here. 

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Wal-Mart Enters iPhone App Arena With Product Recommendations

I just hope it comes with geo-location capabilities so you can find your way around the store.

Wal-Mart, of course, has a hugely successful mobile website with 1.58 million unique users per month, and it does the whole text-you-an-offer thing. Now it's got an iPhone app that will help you find a store, offers recommendations on consumer electronics products and a social media tool that lets you post products to your Facebook page to solicit opinions from friends. 

Personally, I think the whole social shopping thing works a little better in apparel - teenage girls, in particular, seem to want to get feedback on how they look in specific fashions. Soliciting advice on a toaster even or a Blu-Ray player seems far less interesting.

And I'm not sure product recommendations make a lot of sense, as it will probably just feel like Wal-Mart pushing excess inventories of particular products. Consumer reviews might be a better way to go.

There is one function that sounds very cool, however: Shoppers can snap photos of a room, for instance, and a box appears on top of the room that they can stretch and get the scaled dimensions for, say, an appropriately-sized widescreen TV.

That by itself makes this a winner - even if you don't end up buying the TV at Wal-Mart.

Read more, here.

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GQ's iPhone App Launches; More Than Just The Magazine

The first of the new digital iPhone versions of GQ that I posted about last month has finally launched, timed to the release of the pub's Men of the Year issue.

Word is that this is not just a digital replica of the popular Conde Nast magazine. If you click on a product ad, you're taken to the product's website. Like a song in a music review? Click to download it. Or you can watch videos of the interviews featured in the issue.

Sounds very cool - and a nice extension for this venerable brand. And at $2.99 instead of $5, it's a bargain.

Read more (by way of textually) here.

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Online Bookseller Uses QR Codes, Twitter To Create A Viral Sensation

You're going to want to see how this innovative campaign from Editoras became a viral sensation by using QR codes and Twitter to crowd source the creation of a book that became a bestseller - and blockbuster website traffic builder.

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Swatch Helps 'Distill' Magazine Go Mobile With iPhone App

Distill - a kind of compilation magazine of the best from the international style and fashion press - is extending its brand to mobile phone with a new iPhone app.

The iPhone app is brought to you by Swatch in conjunction with the launch of their new Chrono Automatic collection of watches.

It's unclear if this is just a single issue (the app costs $4.99) or a new distribution mode for the magazine. It's also unclear how this brings added value to readers.

But hey, an iPhone app is de riguer these days. Which is probably a phrase this pub's audience understands and appreciates very well.

Check it out yourself, here.

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Royal Navy's New Recruitment iPhone/Facebook App

One look at this and I knew it's got to be Glue.

The London-based agency, which has done Cannes Gold-winning work for the Royal Navy in terms of personalized video, has collaborated with Marvellous to create a new iPhone app designed to recruit marine engineers via an "Engineer Officer Challenge" social media game played across an iPhone app and a Facebook widget.

The details, according to the companies:

1. The Royal Navy Engineer Officer Challenge will put potential recruits through their paces with 5 interactive missions – each based on realistic Royal Navy training tasks. Utilising features including the iPhone’s touch screen interface and accelerometer, some challenges are set aboard HMS Deter, urgently needing repairs.

2. As the Lieutenant in charge, the player makes crucial decisions, as they would as an Engineering Officer - from fixing the engine or preparing for a simulated missile attack, to re-wiring the radar system.

3. After each challenge the player is presented with video footage revealing the impact of their decisions in the task. Once completed their score is submitted to a leaderboard where they can challenge a friend or simply visit the Royal Navy website for more in-depth career information, or join the Royal Navy Facebook group.

4. The Facebook widget replicates the iPhone app in allowing users to get the feel for a virtual “hands –on” engineering experience, as well as enabling people to share among friends and start a discussion.

5. The Royal Navy Engineer Officer Challenge is available on the iPhone and iPod Touch and can be accessed via the iTunes app store. The widget can be downloaded from the Royal Navy Recruitment Facebook page, or the applications section on Facebook.

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Apple Planning Unskippable Ad Technology For Mobile?

Say it ain't so, Steve.

Word's out that Apple's recent patent moves include "enforcement" schema that integrates advertising into its hardware and software that users can't skip. In fact, apparently the user would need to confirm that they'd viewed the ad before proceeding with content. It may even be a big part of the business model for Apple's new Tablet.

I'm not sure if that also means it could be tied to video and music content accessed on the iPhone or iPod, but one can easily see how it would work with free apps. Most people prefer free apps over paid ones, so being able to demonstrate to advertisers and app companies that these free apps could be monetized would be very powerful.

But there must be a better way. Mobile ads are an unbearable bore (thank goodness Apple didn't buy AdMob). And once we're drowning in them, they're going to get even older, even faster. Experiences or offers based around brands, on the other hand, would not only be more compelling, but have true brand value. For instance, content brands could offer points toward products based on the user's performance in free game apps. Or retailers and brand partners could offer coupons based on content or apps known to appeal to their target audience. Think offers from Maybeline based on viewership of Gossip Girl.

As study after study indicates, anything's more compelling than mobile advertising.

Read more here and here.

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Prius iPhone App Puts Times Square Passersby In Creative Mood

Mobile activates digital signage in this fun. lighthearted initiative. It's a town where nobody drives their own car, but hey - no reason this couldn't work in Union Square in San Francisco.

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