Ad-Appt

Ad-Appt

Friday 21 May 2010

Get lost.

So I've been meaning to write a piece on Android for a while.

As an owner of an HTC Hero, its currently my mobile OS of choice, and I have to say, that despite the hardware limitations of the said phone (its a bit slow to respond sometimes), I'm actually very impressed with the operating system itself. So with my personal opinion of the OS out of the way, there are a few other things I would like to cover in the coming three articles.

Firstly: Using the Marketplace
Secondly: The state of the apps
Thirdly: The future of the Android Marketplace

I've had the Android device for 4 months so far, and I've been downloading an eclectic selection of free, and paid for, apps. For anyone who has yet to use the Android app market, upon entering the Marketplace app itself, you are initially presented with about 4 different choices. Firstly 'featured' apps - a selection of mostly paid for apps for premium brands such as Spotify, along with a couple of free apps, selected, presumably, by a deity somewhere in Google towers. Below that you can brows either 'Applications' or 'Games'. Within the 'Applications' menu there are further subcategories for various types of app. Within these you are presented with a list of apps sorted either by date, or popularity. For me, the biggest problem with this is that there are supposedly 30000+ apps on the market. This means that within each category there is, on average, about 3000 apps.

Fine. Thats good of course, choice is almost always a good thing. But it does mean that scrolling through the list is a labour intensive task. Additionally a lot of the apps seem to repeat themselves, and beyond the ratings and reviews you can view, there is no way to sort by 'highest rated'. I suppose you could perhaps argue that 'most popular' (ie: most downloaded) can be correlated with 'highest rated'. Frankly sorting by 'date' seems to be a total waste of time, unless you check the app market every 10 minutes to see what new apps have been released. New apps are released so frequently that this is a community where reputations are built on the strength of user reviews. I can't think of another media in which I rely almost entirely on fellow users to make informed purchase decisions. Since the importance of 'ratings' is given such weight, it would be great to have the choice to sort by 'highest rated - ever' and also 'highest rated - over the last 7 days/month/year etc' - to give new apps the chance to float to the top of the list on their merits. Right now, whatever apps are at the top of the ' most downloaded' list rule the roost, and will continue to do so, regardless of their quality compared to other similar apps.

I can't speak for those of you using the iPhone, but browsing the Android marketplace makes me feel lost very quickly indeed, especially if you aren't extremely specific with what it is you are looking for.

Despite this, I did find a very useful Dice application the other day using the search function, which helped no end with 'drinking snakes and ladders' in the pub.

$1000

Friday’s finally rolled around, which puts everyone in a good mood. Mine was furthered by the news that GQ has launched an iPad (is the little ‘I’ still applicable?) version of its magazine. Admittedly its first issue made them a paltry $1000, but as editor Pete Hunsinger points out – its all profit. The move away from physical media, whether it be CD’s, DVD’s or print, is a no brainer. At the moment, with the emergence of digital media consumption, you can run a digital campaign using the existing material on a dime, so why not? It leaves the big dogs with some interesting discussions about the cost of advertising pricing in this unproven sector.

Thursday 20 May 2010

Pringoooooals!

Whether you like it or not (and you better had, because you can't avoid it), the World Cup is nearly upon us. Like every other event in our calender, the advertisers are climbing all over each other to get a seat in the rollercoaster. High on emotion, consumers the world over are at their most receptive, and it makes for a great time to get your brand name out there.

Advertising heavyweights P&G stepped up to the plate in a big way when it came to the World Cup and created, with help from Sky Media, the Pringooooals app. Functionality-wise, your iphone shouts 'goooooal' when shaken, can be made to blow a whistle, or if the decisions are going against you, shows a red card.

Nothing ground breaking then. But it doesn't need to be. It free and goes down well in our online culture that not only thrives on but expects media to be free (.torrent anyone?).

So the user gets a free event relevant app to play with. What's in it for P&G? Thanks to youtube, great adverts go on to be watched over and over again. However, not every ad can be 'colour like no other' - and once its run has finished, it disappears forever. With an app, you're essentially getting a persistent campaign on iTunes, available forever, for free, spread by word of mouth, everyday use, and propagated by the World Cup - an event someone else is paying for.

The most intelligent ads you'll see this year will be the ones that make the world cup and the users work for them. Pringoooals, currently at number 2 in the commercial app charts is a definite contender.

Back to you in the newsroom

So, to save anyone that stumbles across this page looking for advertising news, I'd love to point you to MobiAD, I've added an RSS feed ----->

Welcome to the Ad-Appt blog

Hi. Welcome.

Right, enough of that.

Ad-Appt has been created with a primary, humble, goal in mind. As a personal commentary to the goings on in the commercial advertising mobile application market.

As with everything in life, we may eventually find ourselves achieving other goals. Lets keep things simple for now though.