‘don’t forget my uncle’ - Mobile Case studies #2

 

Following on from my previous post here are some case studies from the Mobile Travel takes off Google London event.

Mark Freeman from mobile specialist agency Movement took the audience through a number of case studies.

One point I really liked was his ‘don’t forget my uncle’ slide. Mark’s uncle doesn’t own a smartphone and still books via the telephone using a brochure or responding to a DM. Something I and the team have to be constantly mindful of with our customers.

That warning aside he took us through a few examples that the convergence of smartphones, chunky bandwidth networks and creativity have created. 

Road Buddy was one case study. This is a mobile app that plots safe routes to walk home. Pulling in data from the crime database API, in theory, it helps avoid areas that have been crime hotspots.

It was mentioned that the more savvy criminal may use the data to target victims even more effectively.

Douche Parking is an app and website designed to name and shame poor parking. In Russia obstructive parking is a real social problem.

Users upload images of offending cars to the website. The clever bit is the images are then distributed via display advertising to users in the area based on their location. Digital naming and shaming with full social share function.

The geo targeting element to this strategy is the genuine killer app and give the shaming component actual social equity.

Mobile Travel takes off - Google London event

I popped along to the Mobile Travel takes off event at Google London on Wednesday 15 of May.

Aimed at the who’s who of UK online travel I guess it was inevitable I’d bump into lots of former travel clients from my agency side days.

Below and coming up in future blogs are my main takeouts from the afternoon.

Mobile no longer *just* end of funnel transactional

Google are really pushing the fact that there is a trend towards mobile being the start of the discovery stage of the travel funnel, not just the transactional stage.

Yes there are the last click ‘I need a hotel tonight’ last minute transactions that  are on the whole really good at fulfilling but, with their statistic of 47% of all UK travel transactions starting on mobile, more attention needs to be to the top of the funnel ‘needs inspiration’ user.

Desktop sites are fulfilling this task excellently on the whole but Google explained often the user experience on most mobile site versions drops the user mid funnel, not good for the more fluffy user who is just whimsically in dire need of inspiration.

Google’s enhanced PPC campaign  already deals with serving a different “ad based on geo” location and device type amongst other things which in part can help with this issue but if the site the user lands on isn’t up to the task it’s a wasted visit.

As a footnote, it’s interesting to see Lastminute.com’slatest TV campaign encouraging users directly to their mobile site and be inspired (e.g. the 20 second Paris ad, rumour has it is unfortunatly the only recent 10 second ad for them that hasn't really performed).

The impact of user generated photography on brand travel imagery

I went to the brand and video strategy day for brand owners at Google London earlier this month.

Some of it was a bit suck eggs but it was a great overview of how the video landscape is rapidly developing and how to bring a brand to life through video.

It very much confirmed that Youtube is still the place to test and learn content idea’s that could be rolled out to wider media formats if they performed. Tick, and on the case with that.

One of the more interesting presentations was from Theresa Kirkham at Getty images – ‘Which type of images appeal to a travel audience’.

She contrasted travel industry photography from ten years ago with the types of images being shot these days. It was amazing just how dated the older imagery looked.

Over processed and staged were the order of the day. Now these images in the context of the user generated imagery often seen alongside brand approved shot’s on the likes of TripAdvisor just seem ancient.

The impact of user generated content (UGC) on brand travel imagery has been far reaching. Instagram in particular has for many users opened up their minds to the fact that pictures can be manipulated within an inch of their lives and still look good.

This has led to an era of more honest photo shoots. Looser shots with models looking like they have just been posted on Instagram. Increasingly brands are using UGC sourced images in their brochures and other media.


Easyjet’s print ad’s were used as an example of informal UGCesq images, a far cry from “American looking Photoshopped unrealities”.

It’s no huge surprise that the great social media revolution that has sped up in the last ten years has led to a more candid and less formal approach to travel photography after all TripAdvisor is only a click away.

Contemporary subtlety wins once again with the new 911 GT3

The new Porsche GT3 911 (991 generation) has some wonderfuldesign twists on the iconic Porsche 911 Carrera model.

911 GT3 on Porsche's excellent Pinterest outpost

Now it in’s 50^th anniversary year, the 911 stillwith it’s engine resolutely mounted in the rear is a great manifestation of evolvinga classic design utilising the latest contemporary design trends.

Porsche owners are always looking for the finest of detailsthat set certain model variants apart. These subtleties start to become moreobvious the more you start looking at the detail.

It could be the LED lights front and rear on the 991 997which indicate it is the generation two 997 variant (997.2) or the bumper and exhaustconfiguration that only exist in the Turbo versions of the iconic car.

The new GT3 has carried forward the subtle evolution withthe integration of the day running lights into the classic rounded 911headlights. A great evolution as I’ve always felt the look of the day runninglights on the previous version (911 997.2) looked a bit ‘me too’ which Porschetend not to fall into.

Anything to do with tweaks to the 911’s headlamp look andfeel is always a sensitive issue after what aberration that was the 911 996Boxter look integrated indicator cluster solution. This gnarly looking versioncheapened the 911 marque at the time.

The design team over at Land Rover could certainly learn athing or two about the subtle use of LED and side emitting fibre optics basedon the Christmas tree look of the previous Range Rover model.

Smug viewer of the Natwest Mustang TV Ad

Perhaps it’s because I’ve gone and got the Mustang equivalent featured in this ad already before the kids arrive on the planet that this ad means something to me....

 

It’s a heart-warming showcase for the multichannel ease that a Natwest Customer can interact with it’s products and services.

Barclays have also used the Fatherhood card but Natwest have achieved the John Lewis-esq ‘ahhh’ factor. If Natwest hadn’t overcharged me as a student I’d consider switching but over charged students have long life time value memories!

The product of a thousand small gestures (and animations)

Much to the amusement of my senior colleagues I’m mildly obsessed with a quote from Michael Eisner who was Disney CEO between 1984 -2005 at the moment:

 

“A brand is a living entity, and is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures”

It’s something that the recent internal conference season has had us driving into our teams via way of a brand alignment and our company vision message.

 

Where it has interested me most is the opportunity to infer these small gestures by considered digital user experience. It’s something that Apple has been doing for years via OSX and more recently iOS.

 

Gizmodos 13 design trends for 2013  sets out one trend ‘Animation as Affordance’. The concept is that small animations illustrate in an intuitive way how to complete a task by visually unfurling a user experience the user otherwise wouldn’t know about.

 

This from the Gizomdo article wonderfully summarises it:

That little camera icon bounces for a brilliant user
experience unfurling reason.
 

The best example I have found yet is the camera icon on the iOS lock screen. Many people unfamiliar with iOS would more than likely resort to just clicking on it instead of dragging it up. Instead of not doing anything when pressed, it does a little bounce up and down; revealing the camera feature underneath. This gives a visual hint to unknowing users as to how to properly use it in the future. By offering this hint, users are able to pick up on things rather quickly.

 

This device could be played out wonderfully throughout a website/mobile/tablet cross channel experience to encourage users down user paths they would not have otherwise considered. From a holiday maker perspective this could manifest on a smart phone based on the users location and time of day to suggest to a user to try Zumba for the first time for example.

 

The subtlety as with any tool that is using such contextually personally sensitive information such as time and location is what could make it work so well.

 

This being a digital channel different levels of animation of affordance could be implemented to establish the optimum number of alternate user path prompts.

 

Back to Michael Eisner’s quote, it’s these small gestures that cumulatively enthuse brand trust and in the end delight the user.

Jimmy Wales got me thinking

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia was in Bristol last week and I popped along to see him at the Victoria Rooms at Bristol University.

I’ve been ‘playing’ with the Internet now for 15+ years and remember when Wikipedia arrived so I feel like I have some kind of affinity with the living web rock legend given the timing of Wikipedia’s launch.

Back then the internet wasn’t mainstream and I felt it was treated with mild contempt in traditional marketing and media circles.

Jimmy came along and pioneered the idea of collaborative working online - much in the same way this group plans to share ideas I guess.

A standout moment for me in Jimmy’s talk had to be that he was really “proud” that Google had pulled out of China, just as a proud father would be. This really emphasised that the 600-strong physical audience and 3000+ internet audience really was in the presence of one of the great internet forefathers.

I go to quite a few conferences throughout the year. I see presenters who have made millions, sometimes billions out of the internet yet stood before us was a dreamer, a blue sky-er who had an idea and ran with it. He didn’t have the Google billions/private 737s but he did have an amazing idea that became a reality.

As with so many things that become ubiquitous it is easy to forget someone had to come up with an idea and then run with it. Jimmy did this and has created something only possible in the Internet age.

This talk was part of a huge #wp10 international roadshow Jimmy had been undertaking so the presentation was fairly straightforward but the passion and real love of the Wikipedia community he clearly has really came across.

There were also plenty of subtle undertones to how he spoke. Asked at the Q&A stage what he thought to net neutrality, Jimmy actually identified the advent of closed operating environments such as Apps as being an even bigger threat to the original Utopian dream of open access internet for all.

He cited Apple in particular as being a key ‘pinch’ point within the current app ecosystem. He mentioned how he worried that his children may never experience the thrill of the traditional coding process.

I’d heard similar musings made by Tim Berners-Lee on his talk at the We-Do lectures. It then got me thinking that it could be relevant to this group.

I grew up playing with BC-108 transistor circuit boards, coding in Commodore 64 basic and then BBC Basic – trying to get games published in the geeky computer magazine press (I got one horse racing game that used the randomiser function of the C64 chip published - that was it!). This then evolved into early HTML and so on.

So that begs the question: are the young of today set to miss out on an entire period of creativity because systems have become so highly evolved/dumbed down?

Personally I don’t think they will. As bandwidth (including mobile) and local processing power continue to increase it simply means that what was previously impossible becomes possible.

Much in the same way Brunel’s broad gauge railway, which some have cited as being an early version of electrification (an engine being propelled by a remote energy source), was restricted by medium of steam itself.

Now with Moore’s law onside, bandwidth a plenty (Nielsen’s law!) and mass market adoption of all things digital, the role of a creative technologist really does seem rather exciting. Applications of technology in creative ways after all is nothing new.

What do you think?