Category Archives: mobile

SXSW “homeless hotspot” concept goes tragically (and predictably) wrong

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What was BBH Labs thinking? Michael Sebastien at PR Daily is on the money in saying that “it might go down as one of the biggest PR disasters of the year.”

New York-based marketing firm BBH Labs equipped homeless people on the streets of Austin with devices that made them wireless hot spots. Internet seekers then paid what they wanted—in cash or via PayPal—to access the Web. The homeless men and women kept all of the money.

The media wasn’t amused, and now BBH Labs is licking its wounds.

ReadWriteWeb slammed BBH Labs, pointing out that these are people, “not helpless pieces of privilege-extending human infrastructure.”

The T-shirts that the people participating in the campaign wear say:

I’M [FIRST NAME],
A 4G HOTSPOT
SMS HH [FIRST NAME]
TO 25827 FOR ACCESS
http://www.homelesshotspots.org

Wired referred to it as something out of a “darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia.”

It seems like the idea was ultimately about benefiting the homeless. I’m a huge fan of that, and anybody familiar with me and my work knows I have no aversion to risky and edgy, either. So I suppose I applaud to core concept.

But I’m also a big fan of thinking things through. “Risky” comes, you know, with risk. If you’re going to take chances, you have an obligation to game the potential scenarios, to anticipate where things might go wrong and to plan your way around the minefields.

It doesn’t look like BBH did a very good job on this front and now they’ve garnered lots and lots of exposure. Contrary to what you may have heard, all publicity is not good publicity, especially when the end result is that you may have actually damaged your cause.

The smartest shopping cart that ever lived

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MediaPost reports this morning on an interesting new survey from TNS, which says that “sixty percent of shoppers across the globe believe that they will be able to pay for purchases using just their fingerprint by 2015, rated top by 25% of shoppers.” Never mind the chill that should send down the spine of anyone who values their privacy – we’ll deal with that another day. For the moment let’s have a look at what people expect from The Future®.

Continue reading →

Agencies “don’t get” social media: sad, but true…

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If you know anything at all about the agency world, this new report tells you a whole lot of what you already know.

‘Agencies Don’t Get It,’ Survey Says
Feb 28, 2008

Clients are placing more emphasis on mastering social media but find their agencies ill equipped to help them succeed in that space, according to a new survey.

TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony polled more than 60 marketers in North America, France and the U.K. to gauge how they are faring navigating the world of social media. It asked them for feedback on their agencies’ abilities to help. TNS found, in its words, “Agencies don’t get it.”

What’s the problem? Continue reading →

New report says mobile use higher among older users than previously thought; yes, but…

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A new report from InsightExpress suggests that mobile penetration and use may be much higher than widely thought.

Key points:

  • …mobile penetration was high across all ages, at 85% and 82% for Gens Y and X, respectively–meanwhile, 80% of younger Boomers surveyed had a mobile phone, followed closely by older Boomers at 79%.
  • Boomers’ handsets were just as cutting edge as their younger counterparts, as 75% of younger Boomers and 68% of older Boomers had phones that supported text messaging–compared to 86% and 82% of Gens Y and X, respectively.
  • Gen Y led the pack in actual text-message usage with 43%, followed by Gen X with 22%–but some 16% of all younger Boomers and 10% of all older Boomers sent or received text messages daily. Continue reading →

Free ringtones

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This isn’t a message that Verizon and AT&T are broadcasting widely, but you don’t have to pay for ringtones. And if you’re like me, the ringtone market doesn’t serve you so well anyway because a lot of your favorite music is from indie artists who may not be popular enough for the companies that produce tones to mess with.

But if you have an audio file on your computer (and this includes any audio file you can find online and download) you can use a free Web service to  convert that file to a ringtone. Continue reading →

Clinton campaign surges into the early 2000s

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Black Dog’ reader (and former student extraordinaire) Jeffrey Folck sends this item along:

I thought you might enjoy this… especially the first line about how Clinton is leading the way in innovative use of the media…

[sigh]

And still, her utilization of mobile is a joke. Mailing a DVD out is fine, but it’s hardly revolutionary. It’s called direct media marketing (like direct mail, only you send CD-ROMs or DVDs) and it’s been around for several years now. Continue reading →

The Internet is dead! Long live … television?

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So says Mark Cuban. Now, I’m typically a big Cuban fan. But I’m looking at an AdAge report on his remarks from yesterday’s Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit, and I’m a little puzzled.

Speaking at the Cable Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) Summit in Washington yesterday, Mr. Cuban declared “the Internet is dead” in an otherwise subdued panel that included executives such as ESPN President George Bodenheimer and Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt.The real growth medium is the “intranet,” otherwise defined as the on-demand and digital video-recording platforms provided by cable companies. “There’s less restriction on the intranet, it’s like your own corporate network for all the cable networks and even wireless,” he elaborated in an interview after the panel. “It’s all locally driven anyways. It has a true neighborhood feel. If I’m in Dallas and I’m on Time Warner Cable, I want localized content.” 

Mr. Cuban views the TV as the real computer, citing the decline in sales of desktop computers as a direct result of where media consumption is moving. “All that [content] is moving to the TV. What’s the difference between a PC and a TV? Nothing.” Social networking and user-generated content are all the rage for Web 2.0, but there’s “nothing on the horizon” from a content perspective, he said (apparently glossing over the looming launches of NBC and News Corp.’s NewCo web-video venture and Joost). Broadband video, according to Mr. Cuban, has “stopped growing.”

There’s a lot to try and parse here, and I wonder if his views would be clearer if I’d heard the entirety of his remarks.

In any case, his concept of “intranet” seems to refer to a proprietary content dump where there’s not much community or interaction. Continue reading →

Verizon Wireless gets it right!

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And now, for a happy story. I bitch so much about how people get it wrong that it’s always great when a company gets it right.

My mobile contract was up and I was looking to upgrade my service and my handset. I work with social media and mobile and the phone I’ve been carrying around is almost embarrassing to pull out around colleagues. It’s kind of like working for Volvo and driving up in a KIA. But more than image, I needed to be fast-forwarding my capabilities – I need to be able to show clients and prospectives what I’m talking about and I need to be able to function better away from the laptop. Continue reading →

Campaign mobile: it’s 1996 all over again

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Every time a new medium catches our attention we have to endure this awkward period where people who have decision-making and spending authority but no understanding of the medium at all treat it like it’s the old media they’re used to. Old assumptions, old practices … failure. It’s like in 1996 when ad agencies discovered the Internet. “I know, let’s digitize our print ads and use those!” Remember how much fun that was on a 9600 baud modem?

Now it’s 1996 for mobility, and nobody is not getting it quite as dramatically as the political sector. Continue reading →