The Obama campaign launched an Obama ’08 iPhone application that is compelling, easy to use, and effective in strengthening his “brand.”  See the following link for Gizmodo’s take.  Having downloaded and played with the application, it is clear that a great deal of thought and planning went into the application’s development.  From features such as the ability to call friends based on battleground states (and keeping track of whether you had in fact called them or not), to the use of LBS features to pinpoint the local Obama HQ near you and provide information on upcoming events, and to have quick access to Obama’s stands on key issues, this application is very much a “must have” for the iPhone wielding Obama supporter.

What I believe is more exciting is that this application gives us a glimpse into things to come.  Imagine a brand-centric application, be it for a luxury brand like Louis Vuitton or a more mainstream brand like Adidas, where avid brand followers can be alerted to the presence of like-minded people in their vicinity, receive members-only invitations to special events happening nearby, and get advance notice on upcoming products.  Add to this the intimacy that is inherent with a person’s relationship with their mobile phone, and what you nurture and foster for the consumer is very strong attachment and affinity to your brand.  THIS is how brand loyalists of the future will be found as people equipped with these applications on their mobile devices become your brand ambassadors and advertise on your behalf.  Microsites may come and go, but a downloaded application could potentially live forever on a user’s mobile device.

For these applications to succeed, the time and resource investment should be treated with equal importance to a full martketing/messaging campaign.  If you try to cut corners on the investment, time, and resources required to execute successfully, the end result could be a decrease in brand affinity and ultimately, brand abandonment.  For every great Obama ’08 application, there are many examples of “frustrationware.”  A perfect example of what NOT to emulate is Audi’s A4 driving challenge, which was created to help promote the launch of the redesigned Audi A4.  However, the application was so poorly executed and thoroughly lackluster that the vast majority of reviews on both iTunes and in the blogosphere (such as this link to Autoblog.com) have panned it as not even being worth the time to download it.

As brands continue to investigate pursuing applications as ways to enhance their brand image, they must be willing to make serious investments to be successful.  Hopefully, the Obama ’08 application is a beacon that will usher in the “change we need” for brand-related applications.

comScore, Inc. reported today that as an aggregate, the mobile 3G penetration rate in the US has surpassed that of Western Europe with 28.4% of Americans having 3G mobile devices vs. 28.3% in Western Europe. According to the release, the number of US subscribers with 3G enabled devices grew 80% to 64.2 million users and that the only individual Western European countries with a higher degree of 3G device penetration are Italy and Spain.

While the numbers appear compelling on the surface and portray the US as being a mobile leader, it’s important to take a look closer at the data.  What comScore reported was the number of subscriber devices that were 3G capable.  An important factor in the adoption of 3G capable devices is that the device providers in the US are, for the most part, only carrying 3G capable devices; thus, it’s probably safe to say that the majority of mobile device users are not specifically asking for a high-speed data capable device.  In addition, there isn’t a 1:1 correlation between the number of 3G capable devices and the number of 3G data subscribers.  If this was the case, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint should be posting near oil industry-like results with respect to data revenues and usage.

All cynicism aside, what is encouraging about these numbers is that the groundwork for high speed mobile data consumption is firmly in place. The carriers, for the most part (note to T-mobile: we’re waiting for your 3G network to be lit any day now), have the coverage, the devices are in the hands of consumers, and the affordable all-you-can-eat data plans are in the market. All that’s left is for more consumers to take the plunge and start using the mobile Internet. With the elegant mobile browsing trend started by the iPhone, followed by the LG Dare, and BlackBerry Bold among other devices, consumers are beginning to develop a hunger for the mobile Internet, but this hunger is still at the “appetizer” level. For this to grow to the “main course,” content providers need to entice the consumers.

New and creative ways of accessing and browsing the “Internet” incorporating GPS/location-based services, geotagging, temporal social networks, M2M networks, m-Commerce, and over-the-air collaboration among others should be leveraged by content creators to deliver compelling mobile interactions and destinations that consumers will seek out, and this cannot accomplished by simply “shrinking the homepage.” At the end of the day, it is important to treat the mobile screen as a new, yet synergistic, platform and to facilitate innovation in order for the mobile Internet to become as successful as the wireline Internet.

A recent TechCrunch article, stated that Hulu.com, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. for free streaming of television shows and movies, will not only be showing season permieres of popular NBC and Fox shows such as 30 Rock, The Office, Heroes, Prison Break, Bones, etc., but will also be the site to turn to catch new shows and shows in their sophomore season a week earlier than broadcast TV.  These shows include Knight Rider, Chuck, Lipstick Jungle, and Life.

While this can be seen as a publicity stunt to garner attention to shows that may need additional coverage to convince people to tune in, the fact of the matter is that more and more people are turning online to watch TV instead.  In a recent survey by Integrated Media Measurement Inc., 20% of all TV viewing in the US is occuring online.  As devices such as DVRs and services like Apple’s iTunes continue to erode away at the the base of those who prefer to watch TV in “real time,” broadcasters are finally recognizing that these additional outlets for their content are not enemies, but rather, powerful allies.

As broadcasters learn to monitor and mine the data of those who watch their shows online with sites such as Hulu, they can better quantify and categorize the viewing community.  Broadcasters will know what age, gender, and income demographics make up the average Chuck viewer vs. that of Lipstick Jungle.  Armed with this data, broadcasters can package new, targeted commercial arrangements to potential advertisers and be able to charge a premium for this advertising since it is certain to reach the advertiser’s target audience.

However, reaching the target demographic is not the same as connecting with the target audience.  For this to occur, broadcasters need to gather more information than the basic demographic information.  To truly connect and deliver value to advertisers, the broadcasters need to have a continual dialogue with the audience, learning about their specific wants, needs, and desires so that relevant audience clusters and personas can be generated for each show.

While this is a good first step online, there is still a way to go before truly relevant and customized messaging reaches the viewing audience.

For decades, Porsche has been a symbol representing the best sports cars to come from Germany.  Sadly for most of us, the direct correlation between the performance of a Porsche and the price of one has made it but a dream – highly sought after and desired, but unattainable.  Audience poll: for the petrolheads, who among us did not have a poster of a Porsche on our bedroom walls when we were teenagers?

Porsche wants us to believe that owning one is a real possibility and has taken many steps to do so on their website.  The splash page (pictured below) is a manifesto for us to just state that “I can” own a Porsche and it will become a reality.

Porsche Home Page - click image to enlarge

The real genius of the marketers at Porsche comes through once you start exploring a particular model, say the Cayman.  There is an option on the page marked “Picture It” that allows you to upload a photo of your house, and effectively Photoshop a Porsche in your driveway.

Porsche Cayman info page - click image to enlarge

Picture It - click image to enlarge

To help you envision this, Porsche provides you some basic tools to place the car on your photo and adjust it for size, perspective, clarity, etc. so that you can try to make the image look as natural as possible.  Here’s one that I made:

Cayman in Driveway - click on image to enlarge

Once you finish your image, Porsche allows you to save it as a wallpaper (with some Porsche marketing messaging and imagery),

Final Wallpaper - click on image to enlarge

and as an email-friendly size JPG for you to send to your friends which, incidentally, does NOT have any Porsche messaging – allowing you to easily brag to your friends about owning a Porsche without actually owning one.

For Porsche (and sports car) enthusiasts, this is a great application that allows users to take Porsche’s properties and literally bring them to their desktops.  Furthermore, users can propogate Porsche’s content beyond the confines of the user’s PC with the “bragging rights” images that can not only be emailed to their friends, but can also be uploaded to social networking sites, other blogs, etc.

The downside is that brand detractors can create silly or even controversial images using the same assets (for a refresher, see GM’s failed attempt at user generated commercials here), like so:

Porsche Jumping a Drawbridge - click to enlarge

However, considering the strength of Porsche’s brand and the desirability of its vehicles, giving users control over its assets is not really a gamble as the odds are greatly in Porsche’s favor that this campaign will generate more positive buzz and brand equity than negative.  For other brands who want to explore giving users control, it is critical to assess their own brand’s value before potentially opening a Pandora’s Box and tarnishing the brand’s image.

In this day and age where information leaks abound, you can be certain that most things that should be for a company’s internal use will “somehow” find its way onto the Internet.  While blog and web postings on future product developments, product releases, price cuts, etc. may generate positive buzz and interest from the online community, there is a dark side to this as well.

Recently, there have been two “for internal use only” sales/promotional videos that have leaked onto the web.  The first is one for Microsoft Vista SP1 and the second was for Mercedes-Benz.  The Microsoft Vista internal promo, complete with a faux Bruce Springsteen and a recreation of the “Dancing in the Dark” music video with a Courtney Cox lookalike, has been soundly ridiculed by all the major technology blogs from Engadget to Gizmodo as well as major news outlets like the Wall Street Journal and CNET.  Microsoft initially tried to spin it as a gag and a parody, but it’s clear that the company made a real financial investment to produce this video and intended to use it to rally the sales troops.

More recently, a Mercedes-Benz promotional video intended to boost sales morale has been circulating on the Internet.  The tone of this video, featuring a Bon Jovi wannabe (sidenote: what is this fixation on New Jersey bands by big corporations?), is far more juvenile in nature with such trash talking lines as “Gone is the Bimmer, and to Audi say ‘bye bye.’“  However, the most damaging lines occur around the 2:15 minute mark of the video where Fake Bon Jovi sings “At Volvo they worry, the Japs they just cry.”  Considering that Japan and the Far East market constitutes over 10% of Mercedes Benz’s sales, allowing the use of a racially derogatory term in an internal promotional video was not the wisest of choices.  Luckily for Mercedes-Benz, it appears their damage control team worked quickly as the video has now been pulled from YouTube.

The lessons learned from these internal video leaks are threefold.  First, regardless of how honest or law-abiding your employees are, always assume that confidential information will escape.  Very few companies are “airtight.”  According to a recent study by Xerox, 80% of enterprise information attacks/leaks are by insiders.  In addition, with the availability of cheap bandwidth and wide reach many blogs and file sharing sites have, the speed at which the leaks proliferate is stunning.  Second, make sure your firm has a diversity/cultural sensitivity team that reviews and approves all content and media prior to greater distribution.  We can look back and laugh at naming faux pas like the Chevy Nova (roughly meaning “does not go” in Spanish), but in today’s high speed digital age, these oversights can spread like wildfire and generate a mountain of negative publicity.  Third, have a damage control process in place to constantly monitor the chatter on the Internet to ensure that if embarrassing information has been leaked to the Internet, you are able to address it quickly.

In a perfect world, everyone would be law abiding, globally aware, and culturally sophisticated.  However, we live in a place that is far from perfect and as such, companies must be equipped to prevent, minimize and mitigate the effects of internal information leaks.  If companies do not plan for these eventualities, they will be on the receiving end of more buzz than they could hope for – of the negative kind.

Recently, Toyota aired a commercial for the Toyota Tacoma during an SEC College Football Game (between LSU and Florida) which parodies one of the better known Internet memes (“Leeroy Jenkins”) in World of Warcraft. In addition, Toyota will be releasing a free Xbox Live Arcade game on October 10th in which players can drive around a Toyota Yaris and “drive it on crazy tracks loaded with stubborn obstacles, cool powerups, and intense enemy action.” This is not Toyota’s first foray into online gaming, as it has been peddling Scions online in Second Life an Whyville.

What is interesting about these latest attempts are the budgets required to implement them.  Clearly, working with Blizzard to get the World of Warcraft elements and purchasing the advertising time during a major college football game did not come cheap.  In addition, creating a free downloadable game for Xbox Live required a financial commitment as well.  It is apparent that Toyota is priming the pump for the next generation of car buyers and attempting to create goodwill and positive brand image and associations with their products.  After all, it is the Yaris that is being featured in the Xbox Live Arcade game, not the Camry or Avalon.  

As innovative and new as this may seem now, brands have attempted this in the past.  Back in the days of the Atari 2600, we had the Pepsi Invaders and Kool-Aid Man games in 1983.  For the NES, we had the Yo! Noid (Domino’s Pizza), Spot (7-UP), and M.C. Kids (McDonald’s) games.  The main difference here is that we as consumers had to pay full retail prices for these advergames.  Today. the new games being released are either free or have minimal cost – look at Burger King’s Xbox/Xbox 360 games from last year.   The hopes for the advertisers are that if they produce games that are halfway decent and enjoyable, this will translate into positive brand experiences for the consumers and that will impact their purchasing behaviors in the future.

This is just the beginning and we’ll see more and more advergaming.  It’s already happening – Burger King just signed a deal with Mobliss to create mobile games for cell phones.

Recently, Reuters reported that MTV Networks will invest more than $500 million in games. Let’s take a moment and reflect on that figure. FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. That’s a lot of money being spent on something that until recently was categorized as an activity for overgrown man-childs living in their parents’ basements. What is behind this cash injection? Eyeballs are leaving the TV screen for the gaming screens.

According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 28 hours of television a week. A funny thing happens, however, once people discover gaming and online games. According to the Daedalus Project, a site dedicated to researching the psychology of Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), the average MMORPG gamer spends 21 hours a week playing the game and only 7.7 hours a week watching television.

There are only a finite number of hours in any given day, so unless one decides to forego some of life’s necessities (eating, sleeping, etc.), one form of activity must give way to another. What’s interesting to note that the total number of hours spent in these leisure activities has not changed but rather the allocation of that time. In addition, nearly half of MTV’s viewers play games, not a surprise considering the focus on youth entertainment.

Much like how MTV sparked a TV revolution and made the music video a mainstay in pop culture, it wants to play a leading role in the next era of entertainment. To get a leg-up, MTV acquired Harmonix (NYTimes.com – free registration required), the developer behind the highly regarded Guitar Hero series of games, and they will be releasing Rock Band in November 2007. Other recent acquisitions by MTV related to the gaming and online space are: Atom Entertainment (Shockwave.com), Xfire (online game networking service), and GameTrailers.com.

So what does MTV hope to do with these acquisitions? At a minimum, MTV is creating an infrastructure and ecosystem in which they can be front and center. At best, MTV becomes the entertainment focus for a new generation. Imagine the multiple touchpoint opportunities for the brand as someone who is watching a new music video by their favorite band (on TV, on their PC, on their cell phone) is alerted to the fact that this new single is now available as a download on Xbox Live for Rock Band. Combine this with the ability to compete against friends on Xbox Live and be able to record the competition and then upload the video to “User Movies” section on GameTrailers.com. The “rock-off” generates so much buzz that the people involved become instant pseudo-rock celebrities so they actually get signed by MTV for the latest season of “Making the Band.” And this cycle continues to propagate.

Beyond creating a ubiquitous presence for the MTV brand, think of the viewer/usage CRM data that MTV would be able to mine. Considering the fickle nature of the youth market, having a constant finger on the pulse of what’s hot or not could also help MTV customize their viewership’s interaction with the brand. Add to this the premium in advertising fees MTV could charge to advertisers to get tailored messages to the viewers/users with which the messages would resonate reaching the consumers at every level in the mediums they interact in (TV, games, web, etc.).

In the 80’s MTV had some great, campy TV commercials that always ended with someone saying “I want my MTV!” With this move towards becoming the entertainment nexus, perhaps the new slogan will be “I can’t live without my MTV?”