I was reminiscing yesterday in conversation at the BizSpark Europe summit about the first smartphone app that I ever saw. A good friend had, a few years ago now, had just got his first iPhone, and was excitedly demonstrating the iPint app – a piece of marketing gimmickry that replicated a pint of lager in every respect other than it’s refreshment and intoxication (the two parts of the beer experience I hold in highest regard). The fact that Phil was demonstrating this to me whilst it was his turn to get the next round as we stood in a Carnaby Street pub added irony to the pointlessness.
But, a few years on, the simple fact is that that App has stuck in my mind. It was a guerrilla marketing campaign for Carling – a brand that I never drink.
I couldn’t tell you what Apps I painfully installed back in the day on the various PDAs and Nokia phones in those dark days before App stores. I couldn’t even tell you what the first Apps were that I installed on the first touch-screen smart phone that I owned. But the Carling iPint…
As I start to look at the world of Apps and marketing, two things seem to be filtering up: there aren’t yet any clear models for mobile advertising, and also that many of the traditional big advertising spenders aren’t yet really spending heavily on mobile.
The iPint app, all those years ago, shows though that nonsensical, seemingly pointless frippery can have an impact when it comes to brand recognition. In the UK on traditional media there is a long tradition of this; in recent years we have had:
- drum-soloing gorillas selling chocolate
- inexplicably Russian-accented meerkats selling financial services price comparison sites
- and even a knitted monkey glove puppet that was so popular selling a now-defunct digital TV service that it went on to sell tea bags
But for every one of these novelties there will be a stack that fail.
The reality is that innovation comes at the price of needing to expect failure: I wrote some time ago about how increasing risk-aversion means that much of the broader “creative industry” is seeming to become less innovative as the needs for mitigating failure become greater. Getting to grips with new media channels at a time when every penny is being expected to work harder and harder is going to be an interesting challenge in the marketer’s continuing quest to capture bits of people’s attention.
mmitII 