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'Iron Man' Seeks Gold In Mobile Content

That other man of steel is coming to a cell phone near you.

I posted last month on how Marvel's "Iron Man" and "Hulk" movies are both launching with mobile games.

But now, there are more details about the game for "Iron Man," which hits theaters on Friday.

Shouts a release in Marvel-esque understatement:

In the vertically scrolling shoot-'em-up Iron Man mobile game, players take control of the invincible Iron Man while fighting through four levels of nonstop action based on the upcoming movie starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard.  Equipped with repulsor rays and the devastating unibeam, players will visit many locations, including those from the movie, while at the same time blasting away at enemy forces equipped with the weapons Tony Stark had himself developed.  Iron Man must collect power-ups to increase the effectiveness of each weapon and destroy relentless waves of enemy units en route to a climactic confrontation with the world's greatest new foe: Iron Monger!

For more information on Marvel Mobile content, click here.

And for all those fanboys out there, Iron Man the mobile game may be downloaded in the U.S. by text messaging IRON to 46966.

Read more about the game, from Hand's-On Mobile, Inc., click here.

And to read about how a growing number of Hollywood studios are turning to mobile games and content to help fuel fandamonium for their movies, click here.

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Lufthansa Turns Your Mobile Into Your Boarding Pass

Passengers flying Lufthansa are getting a new reason to love their mobile phone.

Various news organizations are reporting that passengers flying the airline from Hamburg to Munich or Frankfurt will now be able to use a new mobile boarding pass service.

Passengers with web-enabled p hones will be able to be sent an electronic boarding pass by email or SMS link. An onscreen 2D barcode can be read by a scanner at the gate.

Word has it hackers have been able to do this with just about any boarding pass using iPhones, but that's another story.

Read about the Lufthansa initiative, here.

And see how other airlines are rolling out a whole slew of mobile-enabled services for travelers, here.

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Paramount Launches Mobile Game for 'SHOOTER'

Paramount's "Shooter" is getting a first-person shooter game.

"Shooter: The Official Mobile Game" comes from Paramount and Hong Kong-based Artificial Life, and allows players to "become Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger while taking on covert sniper missions along with heavy combat challenges that the player must successfully complete in a journey to uncover the truth."

The movie's been out for a while, but a long lapse between release date and mobile games hasn't stopped successful roll outs before.

In BRANDING UNBOUND the book, I look at how a growing number of Hollywood movies are getting the mobile gaming treatment. And in an article for The Mobile Marketing Association, I look at how these "advergames" can not only boost a film's incremental income, but also help fuel fandamonium.

Read more about the "Shooter" game, here.

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Visa Looks At 'Store of The Future' for RFID, Mobile Retail Made Real

A new study commissioned by Visa Europe finds the future means more digitization in retailers.

RetailBulletin reports that a study from the Centre for Retail Research, projects that from 2012-2015, as websites increasingly transactional rather than informational, we are also likely to see a rise in the application of technology within physical stores.

Think automated self scanning, product tracking for inventory using RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) and targeted promotions delivered directly to consumers while they shop, whether through store-based or mobile systems.

In addition they are likely to have access to PC/web based facilities in store giving immediate access to product and customer reviews.

As Dr. Steve Perry, Executive Vice president, Visa Europe, tells the pub: “The 'Store of the Future' is likely to be shaped by a range of technologies in the digital era, but all will have a common goal - to create greater convenience for the customer and in turn achieve stronger differentiation and business success for the retailer.“

In BRANDING UNBOUND the book, I look at how a number of retailers are putting such technologies into play now, from Nanette Lepore to Prada, and from QuickStop Markets to Metro.

Read the RetailBulletin piece, here.

And get the inside scoop on the store of tomorrow, here.

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Hearst Magazines Make New Mobile Ad Play With ShopText

All this talk about Men's Health and Rolling Stone has had an impact on Hearst.

Hearst Magazines Digital Media, a unit of Hearst Magazines, has announced that it has partnered with ShopText to deliver a broad range of text messaging services to its offline magazine audience.

Now, readers of Hearst magazines - including such popular titles as Cosmopolitan, Cosmo Girl, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, O, The Oprah Magazine and Seventeen - will be able to make purchases, request free samples or enter sweepstakes directly from the pages of the magazine.

There's a method to Hearst's madness: Mobile's been working well for Cosmo Girl magazine since summer 2006.

"In a single issue last summer, the magazine received over 100,000 sweepstake entries via ShopText," says Susan Schulz, editor in chief of Cosmo Girl, by way of example.

Word has it that ShopText also gives Cosmo Girl readers the ability to text to receive free samples of leading health and beauty products. In fact, according to statements announcing the expansion, the magazine says it has already delivered thousands of samples with conversion rates as high as 94%.

In one recent promotion, more than half of the requests came from readers who had used the capability at least once before.

And while Men's Health's initiative uses more advanced camera phone technologies, lowly SMS may be the easiest, and in the short term, best, way of getting started.

As I mention in BRANDING UNBOUND the book, I think mobile makes a must-have response mechanism for magazines (not to mention newspapers, radio, broadcast and outdoor).

What with all the announcements in just the last week, it seems the magazine world in particular is catching on fast.

Read more here.

And see what it matters, here.

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Sweet Sensation: Godiva Mobile

Need some chocolate to go with that BlackBerry.

Godiva's got your fix.

The chocolatier announced today it is working with mobile commerce company Digby to launch Godiva Mobile, a new downloadable application that provides access to Godiva's best selling products, which are updated daily to keep content fresh, on BlackBerrys.

"Godiva Mobile gives our customers another way to order the perfect last minute gift of chocolates, truffles and gift baskets," says Kimberly Land, vice president of the Direct-to-Consumer division of Godiva Chocolatier, in a statement.

"This is a perfect complement to our boutiques, catalog and website. We've been exploring the market for several months, and believe that mobile commerce is emerging as a truly viable fourth channel."

Features include:

•     The ability to complete a shopping transaction in less than thirty

       seconds, without having to endure the frustration of using a mobile browser

•     Rich product descriptions and full-color images

•     A "One-Touch Store-Locator" that utilizes GPS or cell-tower location to
       automatically identify stores close to the user's location.

•     Integration with BlackBerry Maps to provide point-to-point navigation and directions

•     Secure transactions and password protected buying.

But the real genius: Address book integration, which provides the ability to input shipping information with just a few clicks.

So why didn't they also launch an app for the Chocolate cell phone, even just for publicity's sake?

It's food for thought.

Read more here.

Download here. 

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In-Game Mobile Device Plays Prominent Role in 'Grand Theft Auto IV'

Wired has an entertaining piece on the lengths Rockstar Games went to create an in-game mediasphere within the blockbuster new "Grand Theft Auto IV."

You can listen to faux radio, with songs altered to sing about "Liberty City," the game's dystopian stand-in for NYC; watch TV shows and movies; surf a faux web and email (including spam) and even interact with far flung family, friends and mafiosos using your in-game mobile phone, called a "Bittersweet."

As Wired puts it: "You're often multitasking on your in-game Bittersweet' device. You're constantly taking calls and getting text messages while you do drive-bys, receiving photos of targets to help you proceed on missions and using the camera to snap incriminating photos."

In BRANDING UNBOUND the book, I talk with Joe Laszlo, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research, about how such in-game devices help provide a window into the future of mobile - especially as m-commerce evolves to enable you to place purchases at whim.

Speaking about in-game mobile Internet connectivity, Laszlo says "The moment you see something you want, as instantly as the click of a button, it's yours. "That kind of instant gratification may well start to translate into the real world over the next couple of years as people get used to carrying around always-on date connections."

See how it plays out in Liberty City here.

And see how it plays out in your life, here.

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ADWEEK: 'The iPhone Effect'

A growing number of marketers are getting amped about creating branded iPhone apps, according to ADWEEK magazine.

In June, Apple will open up the iPhone platform, and that means a wave of marketers are going to capitalize on the phone's hipness quotient.

Among the initiatives: Intuit has developed an iPhone-only version of Quicken Online. I guess for those who want to balance their checkbooks when they're on the go.

BMW last week announced that its new campaign for the X6 crossover would feature a mobile site for iPhone users. When BMW started putting together its site for mobile devices, "our first priority was to make sure it worked with the iPhone," Patrick McKenna, marketing communications manager at BMW, tells the pub. The automaker was one of the first to include an Apple adapter in its vehicles.

And L'Oreal Paris recently launched its own site devoted to iPhone users. "The iPhone offered the best way into a mobile strategy," said the company in a statement.

It's no wonder. The iPhone is already the primary driver on mobile Web users, with 85% of iPhone users accessing the Web via mobile phones, compared to 58.2% of other smart phone users, and just 13.1% of the total mobile market.

Of course, advertising campaigns aimed at the iPhone crowd aren't suffering either, with iPhone users exhibiting a click through that's 0.3% higher than BlackBerry and Treo owners.

I, for one, applaud the efforts, and the excitement generated by the iPhone. But this revolution would happen even if Apple never invented this hecka-cool device.

It just upped the schedule to the inevitable - and smart marketers are already thinking way beyond the iPhone.

Read the ADWEEK iPhone piece here. And read the recent ADWEEK excerpt of BRANDING UNBOUND, here.

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New Line's 'The Golden Compass' Mobile Campaign Finds Big Results With In-Game Advertising

Looks like Greystripe's getting some great results with in-game mobile advertising.

According to a new report from Dynamic Logic, a mobile advertising campaign for New Line Cinema's "The Golden Compass," which ran during load times for mobile games on the Greystripe network, outperformed a typical online advertising campaign by 52% in terms of brand awareness - and resulted in in a 19.3% increase in awareness for the film, and 9.5% increase in interest in seeing the film among surveyed players.

Not surprisingly, the campaign resonated best among the 18- to 24-year-old crowd.

Pretty compelling. Not the part about beating out online campaigns - results for online campaigns have been tepid for years. But the fact that there nearly there was a 20% increase in awareness, and a nearly 10% increase in interest speaks for itself.

In BRANDING UNBOUND the book, I look at how Jeep, Warner Bros., and others are making use of such in-game mobile advertising. As innovation enables advertisers to insert more targeted ads into games, we'll see those response numbers go up even further.

That is if other marketers' compasses find their way to this golden opportunity.

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'Rolling Stone' Joins 'Men's Health' With Mobile Marketing-Driven Issue

It appears Rolling Stone won't let itself gather any moss when it comes to mobile marketing

Last week, I posted about how Rodale's Men's Health will run an issue this summer in which every ad enables readers to point and click their camera phones to get more information.

Now, today's New York Times reports that the current issue of Wenner Media's venerable pub features ads from five advertisers - including Allstate, Discovery Channel and others, with which readers can use their camera phones to point at the ad, click, and get additional content.

The content includes a motorcycle ringtone from Allstate's motorcycle insurance program, and a video preview of Discovery's new season of "Man v. Wild."

"We've got a product made of paper and kin sent out every two weeks," explains Ray Chelstowski, publiser of Rolling Stone. "We're always in the market to find new ways that we can work with our advertisers in providing empirical data in showing how readers engage and interact with our ads."

But it's not really about data for the advertisers. As Brad Feinberg, direct or media planning for Discovery tells the pub: "The purpose of this really isn't to collect data per se as it is to give readers some value."

"It's cool," adds Lisa Cochrane, vp of marketing for Allstate. "It's innovative and its not a really big risk."

Indeed, in BRANDING UNBOUND the book, I look at how many magazines are starting to offer camera phone-enabled advertising to their clients. In particular, I look at how Jane Magazine uses MMS (multimedia messaging services) to connect advertisers - and editors - with readers.

And I show how things like Spot Codes will make it all much faster and easier for readers.

It's the first really powerful way to make print interactive.

And in today's digital age, that's pretty much synonymous with a new lease on relevance.

Read all about the Rolling Stone mobile issue, here.

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