Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Wrigley's Juicy Fruit now has its own iPhone app. Sweet Talk, essentially a mobile soundboard, comes with a simple twist -- videos of talking mouths accompany voices. The brand encourages users to "spread their sweet" by letting the app talk for them.

To use it, you simply pick from a bank of five mouthy characters with 25 sweet sayings, hold your iPhone under your nose, and let the sweetness fly. Users can share messages via email or Facebook or create their own videos.

It's simple, and we've definitely seen this before. MouthOff, Hardee's Parisian Pick Up, and Emirates iLingual all provide iPhone users the same quirky entertainment. That being said, the app is already seeing success. This week it reached number one free entertainment app in the iTunes store and number five overall. This goes to show that a brand can provide value through frivolous fun, not just practical utility. Execution is also key. Wrigley's managed to make an old idea seem fresh and funny.

See Sweet Talk in action here:

A couple of weeks ago, the American Museum of Natural History released Explorer, an iPhone app and museum guide that has gotten rave reviews. The application makes use of several state of the art technologies, one of which is an indoor Wi-Fi network which allows the Explorer app to pinpoint a user's exact location in the museum and direct them to specific exhibits and even the closest bathroom. It is a prime example of effective brand utility, augmenting a museumgoer's experience while placing the organization's logo on the mobile user's home screen.

What is probably just as impressive as the museum's app is its effort to promote it. AMNH is pushing the application using traditional PR and advertising. Once in the museum, posters educate those waiting in line about the app and how to rent an iPod touch. The ticket stub announces another of its apps: "Dinosaur iPhone app free download at AMNH.ORG/APPs." Of course, Explorer is the first app users see when visiting this URL. Certain exhibits have stickers with iPhones on them as a call-to-action. Ads are visible across the entire museum, it is clear the message AMNH wants to get across.

What's important to realize here, is the power of mobile when properly integrated. As the above image depicts, brand utility plus advertising will yield the best results. Without backing up a mobile application or on-device campaign with advertising, PR, or existing properties, efforts could easily fall flat. We've talked to agencies where a client's refusal to promote an app has resulted in just that.

Another thing to keep in mind is that not all information is meant to be provided through mobile phones just because it can be. Sometimes a "traditional" placard or sticker on an object makes a lot more sense than building an augmented reality application to display the same text. The experience for the user should be as frictionless as possible, and we must consider every medium's strengths and weaknesses. In the case of Explorer, the mobile phone did what nothing else really can -- locate and track a physical individual in order to provide contextual content. Through a combination of the innovative and the obvious, AMNH made a trip to the museum a lot more fun and worthwhile.

Previous coverage of museums using mobile:
Oklahoma Museum Curates with Mobile
MoMa Embraces SMS
Hit Museums and Galleries in Europe

A new social viewing  service called Philo is hoping to differentiate itself from the competition (Miso, Starling, Hot Potato) through some clever stunt marketing. Their "Save Teresa" campaign purports to help Teresa Giudice, a star of Bravo's Real Housewives of New Jersey, and her family "get back on their feet."

Some background: Teresa and her husband Joe filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy back in October, and their belongings are scheduled to be sold at auction on August 22.

For every check-in to RHONJ on Philo, the company will donate $0.01 to the "Save Teresa" fund. All money raised will be used to "repurchase the Giudice's belongings and return them to Teresa and Joe".

The obviously farcical campaign got coverage on Fox News and on Jezebel, Crushable, and other blogs. Whether it will drive people to download the app is debatable, but it definitely raised awareness of the fledgling service.

Overall, Philo is like a combination Miso and Hot Potato. If that means absolutely nothing to you, this is how their site describes it:

Philo makes TV social (again) by letting you connect with your friends and watch, chat, score points, and win awards and credits together.

You can browse around television shows and see what your friends are watching and saying, what's popular, what's on that you may like based on what you've watched, or scroll through a guide to see what else is on. Once you find something you like.... Tune-in!

Once you've tuned into a show, you can follow the conversation about the show and participate by contributing your own comments. Your comments will be posted to your favorite social networks (if you like) with links so that your friends can see what you're watching and join you so you can watch together.

So when you "check in" to Real Housewives of New Jersey, you get a badge that looks like this:

Then you can chat in-line with your friends and other people watching the show, who have also checked in. Overall, its a nice slick interface. But what will determine the winner of the social viewing game? Features? Partnerships? Influential users? We talked about some ideas in AdWeek recently. What do you think?

Volumique is a French design company that focuses on connecting old and emerging media to create new experiences. They have a number of interesting products that blend the tangible and digital.

From Volumique's website:

We do not consider the e-book as the replacement of the paper book, but we wish to enrich the tangible, emotional and intimate connections that paper brings, with all the new dimensions of the digital world. Each of our projects explores a different face of this union of paper and computation.

Their mission reminds us of papercomp, a subgenre of ubiquitous computing that we covered not too long ago. A few of Volumique's products out later this Fall:

• Pirates: An adventure board game that uses an iPhone as a game piece. It becomes a marine vessel, interacting with the game board and keeping track of what has happened throughout the game.
• The Night of the Living Dead Pixels: A graphical book that makes use of QR codes and is laid out as a sort of "choose your own adventure". Your mobile phone follows you through the story and can complete it with various video segments.
• Pawn: Turns your iPhone into a game board, where physical pawns are placed on the screen to trigger specific interactions.

All of these examples go to show that traditional media is not dying, but will adapt and reposition itself in new ways.

EpicWin is an upcoming iPhone and Android app that turns life into a game.

It’s a streamlined to-do list, to note down all your everday tasks, but with a role-playing spin.

Rather than just mentally ticking off your chores, completing each one improves and develops your character in an onging quest to level-up, gain riches, and develop skills.

EpicWin will take some of the incentives and storytelling elements of games like World of Warcraft to help people get real life things done. We see game mechanics sneaking into other areas of life, Foursquare and Gowalla for places and Miso for television. If what Jesse Schell says comes true, our toothbrush may be next.

See the EpicWin pre-release trailer here:

With iOS 4, developers were presented with over 1500 new APIs, many of which Steve Jobs did not take the time to explain. One of these opens up full access to the user's iTunes library, a big deal for DJs and digital artists.

Create Digital Music explains:

You can now, for instance, scratch audio from songs uploaded from iTunes on a Mac or PC to the device. That is likely to mean a coming flood of DJing on the iPhone and iPod touch, soon to be followed by the iPad whenever the 4.0 OS becomes available for Apple’s tablet.

That flood is coming, but so far, the first app to actually ship with support for the feature is Flare Scratch, a simple simulation of a turntable with touch scratch support. You can scratch any song in your iTunes library.

Many in the DJ community have been playing around with mobile devices as part of their performance. Richie Hawtin has been using an iPad during his Plastikman shows. Opening up access to iTunes is a development that could unlock change and provide artists with new tools.

See Flare Scratch in action here:

Speed Shooter is an app built with the larger Apple ecosystem in mind. It is designed for iPhone to iPad interaction, taking into consideration the strengths of each device.

From the website's description:

Launch Speed Shooter on your iPad, then launch Speed Shooter Pistol on your iPhone/iPod touch. Your iPhone is now a Semi Automatic 9mm Pistol complete with lazer sights. Your iPad becomes your own personal target range.

Key Lime 314, the company behind Speed Shooter, sells a similar app called KL Dartboard. It essentially replaces the shooting range with darts and dartboard.

The ecosystem of screens is a trend that we have been observing for a while. Lead users now have multiple devices that are able to speak to each other in interesting ways. It is becoming increasingly important to think about not only what mobile phone a user has, but also the ecosystem it is a part of. See Poker Surface, Scolu, and Scrabble Tile Rack for additional examples.