Mobile

The marketing agency world is all about illusion. You can be sitting at a table full of eager representatives from an agency and never know that they’re all contractors and hired guns sharing a business card design.

The mobile world is shaping up like that times ten. There are technology platforms to run the campaigns, and then there are probably hundreds of “agencies” built using those platforms. Sometimes the platform is itself an agency. Sometimes they private label it to another group to perform the normal agency functions.

You can get away with that while mobile is so new and it’s all experimental, but at some point its going to have to sort out between the serious players and the rest.

Short answer, hurry.

http://lp.mydas.mobi/custom/stella/iphone/index.php 

Well the creative is all young girls with lollipops – subtle.

I wonder how much these campaigns are limited by the reliance on smart phones or iPhone. My blackberry can’t view the ad. Granted, I’m not exactly the target audience here, but I would think any campaign should have versions available. The fanciest version for the iPhone crowd, then a lower-tech version for people whose phones can’t handle it.

The campaign is supposed to have a viral component, but a lot of people will be excluded due to technology issues. That seems like a waste.

I wonder if a game would be a good execution for something like this. Present a picture of a model wearing an outfit badly put together – mismatch colors or whatever. The game is to identify the fashion errors and correct them with Stella McCartney products. Have some kind of leader board or something.

That would be far more viral. I may be missing something because I’m viewing it on a laptop, not an iPhone, but I didn’t see anything that would make me want to send it to someone.

Then again, I’m not a girl.

Today’s Mobile Marketer issue includes an article by editor in chief Mickey Alam Khan that offers a well thought out assessment of the near future in the mobile world – http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/editorials/2291.html.

Mobile is essentially where Internet marketing lived in the mid- to late-1990s. It’s not quite at the adults table yet. Mobile is an experiment. Mobile is a test.

In a lot of cases, that’s going to mean cutting out the test budget to focus on core offerings. The mobile programs that remain are going to have to be a hit.