Like any other technology, as mobile media becomes more and more prevalent so do the ways in which consumers interact, customize and drive their evolution past that of which the product was originally designed. Repurposing, leveraging and riding the wave of these consumer driven evolutions is a powerful way to bring cutting edge promotions to market. The Pocket Film Festival in Japan is a shining example of this. How would you leverage this new trend in a promotion?

TOKYO (Hollywood Reporter) - The inaugural Pocket Film Festival in Japan, showing movies made entirely on mobile phone cameras, will kick off Friday in Yokohama.

Forty-eight films, chosen from more than 400 entries from 18 countries -- including Japan, Singapore, China, South Korea and Germany -- will screen in competition at the weekend event, organized by the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

The competition has two categories, one for films to be shown on regular screens and the other for films to be viewed on phones. The winning film will receive 500,000 yen (US$4,500).

"Being the first time for the festival, we weren't sure what to expect, but we've had a range of films from regular narrative stories to more experimental films," organizer Yuko Mori said.

"Of course, the resolution is comparatively low on phone cameras, so effective use of that is important," Mori said. "People have also made films where only a camera phone could go. One entry, by grade-school children, was even shot inside a fridge."

The festival also will feature symposiums on the possibilities for new content and applications using the medium of camera phones.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

Link to the main site:

http://www.pocketfilms.jp/en/

Google knows where you are, even without GPS in your phone.

Thanks to Advertising Lab for this one.


On the heels of Samsung's RFID reader news, here's an alternate approach to getting location-specific content into the hands of a mobile-phone user.

My Location is a new beta technology from Google that uses cell tower identification to provide you with approximate location information, so it will work on phones without GPS. Simply fire up Google Maps for mobile, press [0], and the map will indicate your approximate location by centering on a blue circle like this:



If you do have a GPS-enabled device, My Location can actually complement it. My Location kicks in faster than GPS in most cases, so you can access your location even faster on the map. It also works reliably indoors (unlike GPS) and doesn't drain your phone battery at the rate that GPS does.

While the Google piece doesn't mention ad serving, obviously Google can target a user more effectively if they know where she is right now. This looks like it'll see the light of day a lot sooner than Samsung's approach - it's in beta now.

Google Mobile blog

AdverLab article

Another hat-tip to Mark Van Duinen!

In the tradition of the "Second Life is Over" meme of last summer, here's a post on the current head-scratching around mobile marketing, specifically at the MMA meeting earlier this month.

Quote:

Marketers are balking at shifting money into mobile advertising because they don't understand its potential at a fundamental level, said Renee Borkowski, senior VP of database marketing at Arc Worldwide. Marketers "are still struggling with their own mobile phones," Borkowski said. She said the result is a "true gap" between what the industry sees as the mobile phone's future and the realities of dealing with prospective marketers.

Looks like another case of folks who don't understand the technology using it badly, then moving on to the Next Big Thing.

Link

This looks like essentially a multimedia business card. Remember when people were doing these on mini CD-ROMs? Trouble was, you had to actually put the thing into your computer in order to see the content - and sometimes they even got stuck in there (many drives couldn't handle the odd sizes).

This one, by contrast, is a self-contained player. You load it up with content via USB (so clearly it'll be re-loadable), and it's got a battery that lets it display content independent of a computer.

In addition to the obvious business-card use, I can also see this playing a role in a sweepstakes - kind of a multimedia scratch & win, maybe.

From the Gizmag article:

[N]ow this novel new technology that lends itself to countless business applications is hitting the market at a cost of around USD$40 (though previous predictions had the price at $25).

The number of potential business development applications for the device are huge - photo companies can sell them to customers to use as an updateable digital portfolio, real-estate brokers can load images of properties onto the card to tempt prospective buyers, product reps can build relationships by presenting new services on the card to prospects at trade shows or on sales calls, pharmaceutical firms can educate physicians about new treatments via the card and retailers can run promotions and giveaways using information presented on the card.

From the rCard site:

It is an electronic device the size of a thick business card with a high-resolution, color screen that displays slide shows, graphics, photos, text and videos.

Thanks to Rob Webber for the lead.

In some ways this seems like a counter-trend to online music distribution...
and it's a lot more money than a CD. Remains to be seen whether there's enough perceived extra value to get consumers to go for it.

I do think the promotional possibilities are intriguing.

Quote:

Matchbox Twenty's new album, Exile on Mainstream, is being sold on a USB bracelet. Available exclusively at Best Buy, the $35 item includes all 17 songs from the album (released Oct. 2), music video How Far We've Come, another video with band interviews, a digital booklet with album art and other band items to customize your computer.

Link

Thanks to Kresta Hodges for this one!

These guys do stock animation specifically for the retail POP digital signage market. Looks like it's delivered in Quicktime. Holiday backgrounds, Valentine's Day hearts floating across the screen, etc.

Interesting niche - could save searching through acres of non-relevant video footage.

Link

In a mashup of cell phones and digital signage, TI has started showing its Pico Projector - a tiny digital projector built into a phone. Now if they could just build one into an iPhone...
This tech was first seen at last year's CES, but looks to be available next year.

Popular Science Blog - A Picture In Your Palm

Honda featured the band "Fall Out Boy" in a Google Gadget Ad, which contained several dozen videos of the band and could be added to nearly any website including iGoogle.

Google Gadget Ads

From the press release:
'Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both. Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google(TM) content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement. They support both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models, and offer a variety of contextual, site, geographic and demographic targeting options to ensure the ads reach relevant users with precision and scale.'

"We're always looking for new ways to engage with our consumers," said John Vail, director, interactive marketing, Pepsi-Cola North America. "Google Gadget Ads allowed us to reach the right audience at the right time, with an interactive message that brought our light-hearted Sierra Mist campaign, ‘Squeeze More out of Summer,' to life."

Advertising Age - Digital - Nokia Moves Closer to Being an Ad Seller

In addition to Nokia's interesting partnership with Adobe (they had their own spotlight time on stage at the Creative Suite conference, are rolling out millions of devices enabled with Flash Light in the next few years, and are all over Device Central) - now Nokia has the workings of a real content delivery network.

Note that consumers are likely to react very negatively to this unless the advertising is highly targeted - another reason to embrace more and more customization and personalization of content. Luckily, with Nokia driving, the relationship is already there - though I'm still not sure I'll appreciate getting SPAM from my phone company.

Virgin America have announced that "sometime in 2008" you'll be able to connect to the internet from their flights, using either your own device (laptop, PDA, etc.) or their seatback-screen based application.
More info here and here.