Angry Smartphones

I was joking last week, when I saw a poster of an Angry Bird in the window of Barnes and Noble, that read "Birds and Noble", that maybe 2011 was the year that Angry Birds jumped the Cabbage Patch and over-saturated.  Probably not likely, but you can't swing a dead cat without seeing a bird or pig flip flop, tee shirt, stuffed animal or coffee mug this holiday season.  More importantly, however, is the vehicle that drove the birds and pigs to this swank party, the smartphone, and its impressive growth here in the United States and abroad.

Android Biggest OS, Apple Biggest Manufacturer

The Nielsen Company recently noted that Android and iPhones make up 71% of smartphone owners in the U.S. but 83% of the app downloads.  Of the embedded market, 44% own smartphones now, while 56% of new purchases are smartphones.  People want their Angry Birds.

Recently, in the United Kingdom, Kantar Worldwide ComTech found that the pent-up demand for the iPhone 4S accelerated new iOS phone sales shares to 42.8% of all smartphone sales in October.  Smartphones made up 69.1% of all new mobile sales!  It will be interesting to see 4Q numbers to see if the iPhone trend is local or global.  I normally would also not expect it to be sustainable, but the only wrinkle in that opinion is the massive amounts of litigation going on between Apple and Android licensees.  Tomorrow, there is a ruling which could result in an import ban for HTC, for example, and if it happened, that could boost other Android sales, like Motorola's new, stylish DROID RAZR, or maybe give Apple a bump.

Stay tuned.

Free Beer

I live in Texas, and I’ve dreamed of improving my guitar skills, starting a band, and leaving the marketing and technology world behind.  I would name my band Free Beer.  We’d play Texas Rock, some Blues, and throw in an occasional Radiohead song to keep the audience on their toes.  You’d drive down the local Farm-to-Market road by Joe’s Roadhouse, and the sign would read, “Free Beer Tonight.”  Sure, we might need to find a new town to play in, every night, to make the marketing ploy effective, but, hey, Texas is a big place!

Jamming or constipated?

Yesterday, our excellent Marketing Director sent me a link to a new mobile app produced for Moosejaw outfitters, called Moosejaw Xray (Android, iPhone).  Download it.  It corresponds to their winter catalog, and it uses augmented reality to give shoppers a more risqué view of the models in their catalog, without all those puffy, winter outer garments. 

As the male of the species, I found the marketing ploy intriguing.  I must study this catalog, intently.  As a marketer, however, I wondered if their budget would have been better spent elsewhere.  Hey, I admit, I downloaded it and looked at their catalog.  I even tweeted about it, and now I am writing a blog entry, referencing their campaign.  It’s got sexy women in lingerie, for Pete’s sake, what am I supposed to do, ignore it?

The reality is, however, they don’t sell the under garments, from what I can tell, so the campaign is really about generating buzz and brand awareness.   I don’t know Moosejaw, but I’d guess that the campaign is in line with their brand, as well.  It’s probably not a bad idea, in the end, but I just wonder if they will need to find a new town to play in the next time.

UPDATE: It's the Screen, Stupid!

I remember when the Palm IIIc came out, Palm was on top of the handheld organizer world.  You could not imagine a day when they would not be on the top of the PDA heap.  As they moved to color screens, they focused their engineering decision on cost and low-power, while HTC, who made the COMPAQ iPAQ chose the best screen possible for their color Windows CE PDA.  Hey, it was the focus on that criteria that put them to the top, but the world was changing beneath them.

When consumer came up to the glass case at their local COMPUSA or Circuit City (you remember them, don't you?) they would see this Palm device with a washed out screen next to the iPAQ with bright, clear colors and details.  Sold.  The iPAQ did well in the market.

Motorola DROID RAZR

I was bummed yesterday when I read the review for the new Motorola DROID RAZR.  The review focuses on the poor screen chosen for this slick, new Android smartphone.  I was thinking of buying one, and I guess I still might, but we still have not learned our lessons.  For some reason, engineers get caught up with buzzwords like AMOLED (LCD screens).  I've actually seen it on commercials for one company's big screen LCD HDTV sets.  Like my mom knows AMOLED from baking powder!  C'mon, we can do better than this, people!

Consumers don't give a rodent's posterior about acronyms.  In this case, they want bright screens, vibrant colors, and sharp details.  This is supposed to be the slickest, thinnest phone.  A revered phone brand revived to revitalize the return of Motorola.  Like that alliteration, huh?  Seriously, why do all the great things to make a great phone and mess up the most visible (and, hence, the most important) part of the experience of the phone: the screen?

Unfortunately, it takes a while to make a phone, so they can't scrape off the top and put it back in the oven.  Hopefully, there is a fix already in the pipeline.

UPDATE: I went to Best Buy for 1 hour on Friday to see both the DROID RAZR and the Kindle Fire, first hand.  The Kindle Fire seemed nice in some ways, maybe a bit jerky in scrolling.  The demo unit just played videos of the web browser and apps, which was strange.  The sales person brought us a unit we could really play with and it was okay.

The DROID RAZR's screen was better than the L.A. Times article noted, but was over-saturated and the whites were not white, so they were not far off with the review.  It was extremely thin, very fast, but also quite wide and tall.  I would love the thinness, with a smaller and better quality screen, for sure.

Android, Where Art Thou?

At work, we have a large client for whom we develop an application for on both the Android and the iPhone.  We have driven a lot of downloads of the application without any use of paid media, so far, but most interestingly is the ratio of iPhone downloads vs. Android downloads, where there are 1.6 times as many iPhone downloads than Android.  So, I started to dig into this mystery.

First, if I look at more instantaneous data, the weekly downloads were equal.  So, maybe while early on in the apps life, before the sales of Android devices grew and surpassed iPhone sales, the iPhone installed base grew big.  Second, maybe the demographics of this client's customers are more skewed towards iPhone ownership?  Hey, although we have not used paid media to get any of the downloads, maybe the marketing is more skewed towards iPhone owners somehow.  Dunno.

With Android commanding almost 1.5 times more market share, however, it needs more explanation.  When I was back at The Nielsen Company, we had a set of data we had collected, which did not specifically show, but implied, that there still are swaths of Android owners that don't know they have an Android phone.  It was the free phone with the 2-year contract, or buy-one-get-one-free with their spouses new phone when they switched carriers.   They have a Porsche on the Autobahn, but still are driving the speed limit.

If this is true, it might explain the lower usage on Android devices vs. iPhone and could also explain this download phenomena, as well.

Free Beer

I live in Texas, and I’ve dreamed of improving my guitar skills, starting a band, and leaving the marketing and technology world behind.  I would name my band Free Beer.  We’d play Texas Rock, some Blues, and throw in an occasional Radiohead song to keep the audience on their toes.  You’d drive down the local Farm-to-Market road by Joe’s Roadhouse, and the sign would read, “Free Beer Tonight.”  Sure, we might need to find a new town to play in, every night, to make the marketing ploy effective, but, hey, Texas is a big place!

Jamming or constipated?

Yesterday, our excellent Marketing Director sent me a link to a new mobile app produced for Moosejaw outfitters, called Moosejaw Xray (Android, iPhone).  Download it.  It corresponds to their winter catalog, and it uses augmented reality to give shoppers a more risqué view of the models in their catalog, without all those puffy, winter outer garments. 

As the male of the species, I found the marketing ploy intriguing.  I must study this catalog, intently.  As a marketer, however, I wondered if their budget would have been better spent elsewhere.  Hey, I admit, I downloaded it and looked at their catalog.  I even tweeted about it, and now I am writing a blog entry, referencing their campaign.  It’s got sexy women in lingerie, for Pete’s sake, what am I supposed to do, ignore it?

The reality is, however, they don’t sell the under garments, from what I can tell, so the campaign is really about generating buzz and brand awareness.   I don’t know Moosejaw, but I’d guess that the campaign is in line with their brand, as well.  It’s probably not a bad idea, in the end, but I just wonder if they will need to find a new town to play in the next time.

Come see me and other industry leaders from Sam's Club, BBC America, The Daily, Ogilvy & Mather, Nutro, The Weather Channel, and Starcom Mediavest talk about tablets in marketing at ad:tech New York City this Thursday at 3:00PM Eastern and 4:30PM Eastern.  If you can't make it, tell a friend and live vicariously through them!

iOS 5 for Digital Marketers

Listen to this guy, he knows what he's talking about:
Rockfish Mobile Blog: IOS 5: 5 Features that Marketers Will Love

Decision-Making 101

Remember the Developer!

With the passing of Steve Jobs this week, and the introduction of 5 new Android phones at AT&T, I am reminded of a great Jobs quote from a 2008 Q3 earnings call where Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital was asking, basically, if Apple was going to make an iPhone Nano to sell more volume.  Steve Jobs' response was classic: "Well, I wasn’t alive then but from everything I heard, Babe Ruth had only one homerun, he just kept hitting it over and over again. So I think the traditional game in the phone market has been to produce a voice phone in a hundred different varieties. But as software starts to become the differentiating technology of this product category, I think that people are going to find that a hundred variations presented to a software developer is not very enticing and most of the competitors in this phone business do not really have much experience in a software platform business. So, we are extremely comfortable with our strategy, our product strategy going forward and we approach it as a software platform company, which is pretty different than most of our competitors."

So, when I see funky new designs from an Android phone manufacturer, with a square screens, I worry about fragmentation and if and how app designers would ever optimize solutions for this odd screen size and orientation.  Sometimes it does not pay to "think different", especially when you are thinking about platform compatibility.