Just about every traditional tool or function people have taken for granted for centuries is up for scrutiny to see how this power might transform it into something better – or revolutionary.
Gamaroff Digital’s Rosh Singh gave a talk at #addmobile yesterday, an intimate niche conference held by media agency Vizeum with speakers from Google, Twitter and Weve (an innovative mobile loyalty platform run by people who really do get this space). The content was precisely this; how “personal digital” and always-on connectivity is creating countless opportunities for consumers to engage better with the world around them, and for brands and marketers to obtain better reach and influence with their target audiences.

Rosh was there to discuss Gamaroff Digital’s advances in mobile ticketing. Out-of-home digital and social integration is something that has captured our interest for years, and event ticketing is one domain we always knew we could make a difference with.

Our work in this area centers around a platform that allows users to pre-register for events on their phones (or desktop), and either pay or generate their ticket for free. The ticket itself is a feature-rich web app that performs many functions such as:

• social media broadcasting,
• networking and communication with other attendees,
• event related content and downloads or
• branded sponsorship information

Corporate event organizers struggle to offer networking opportunities to their attendees because there’s little they can really do other than assemble a crowd in a room. In our world of rich and exciting tech developments, it seems bizarre that people are arriving at corporate events having to rely on chance to meet people that are relevant to them. Attendees of a conference all hope they’ll get some good contacts out of it, but it’s rare that they have the confidence or initiative to squint awkwardly at a lanyard and try to determine whether it’s worth getting roped into a chat.

Our ticketing platform, in this instance, shows you all of the fellow attendees and their job titles, as well as a photo. Additionally, you can reach out to them with contact details provided to arrange meetings e.g. “Hi, I’m here too, can we meet by the water-cooler for a quick chat”. This small feature, which anyone who has ever been to a corporate event can see, completely revolutionizes networking in the same way perhaps dating sites opened up doors for romantic encounters.

Music festivals and movie premieres, for example, also have much to gain from raising ticketing to a new level. Brands who sponsor these events can feature on the ticket providing a higher level of interactive visibility. Also music and film content is highly social and users can download tracks or exclusive content and share it, all within the ticket. Clearly an infinitely better solution than a printed piece of paper or even an RFID tag.

Everyone now has a color screen in their pockets which is connected to the internet. What a wonderfully amazing opportunity for all kinds of content delivery and brand messaging! A ticket is the perfect delivery mechanism for this content because a user cannot gain access to their event without using it and switching on the screen.

All you have to do then is take advantage of that by incorporating deeper, richer and more useful engagement which also drives awareness among friends and you have yourself the definitive next generation in event ticketing.

If you are an event organizer or brand sponsor, talk to us about how concepts like these can create measurable value for you and your attendees.

While it has plenty of uses, it has a particular relevance to serious competitive gamers. For this reason, the brand chose to launch by sponsoring a series of high-profile gaming conferences in the United States called the Supercon Series, including the largest in the country, Megacon, Orlando FL. This event sees a footfall of 50,000 comic, sci-fi and gaming enthusiasts over a 3 day period.

The brand chose Gamaroff Digital’s real-world marketing products to utilise the word-of-mouth power of Facebook and social media to enhance the brand reach at these tournaments. The first event was held in Denver, Colorado, called Fighter Frenzy and was a single day of intense competitive gaming. Hundreds of people attended and over a third of the participants were quick to scan their QR code or NFC handset to get a free sample.

The immense power of Gamaroff’s platform was proven when an average of 200 impressions on Facebook and Twitter were viewed for every user who engaged resulting in many thousands of views. From there, users at home clicked on these posts and were driven to an online Facebook contest where they could win a prize and also retrieve a 50% off coupon, sales of which the brand could then track back to the campaign.

The result was clear and undeniable proof that harnessing live footfall can result in the ability to reach, attract and measure a sizeable audience who are then acquired as part of the brand campaign. Each user at the event was a social media beacon bringing in multiples of people to engage with the brand and even request coupons for purchase.

These concepts prove that every brand who receives physical footfall as part of their business can make the most of online social media in the same way that purely digital campaigns do. Bring Facebook and Twitter to the people and brands can have all the advantages that their online only counterparts have enjoyed for years.

The next event in the Supercon series where 8-12hz will be out in full force is called Animeland Wasabi, a 3 day event with an estimated footfall of 5,000. If Fighter Frenzy is anything to go by, the brand can look forward to a significant result in fan and customer acquisition – an excellent and innovative way to launch a new consumer product.

The digital industry has since ballooned and has clearly changed marketing forever, providing every kind of advantage such as the ability to target, measure, influence and reach our audiences like never before.

But what few in the digital industry realise is that this is happening all over again under their noses. Industry giants have been caught off-guard by massive and sudden shifts in the way consumers interact with their world and the subsequent effect it has on everything they think and do. Digital agencies are no longer digital agencies. They’re just agencies. The reason is because digital is not channel any more, it’s the world consumers exist in primarily – as hard as that may be for many people to believe. We live in a digital age and a digital world and that’s meant not in the cliché sense, but in a very tangible and real one.

Digital marketeers know that they surpassed traditional media some time in the mid 00′s, but are not realising that it’s happening all over again and this time they are the traditional media.

Social/Local/Mobile at the moment is considered a niche channel in the digital marketing world. It’s something that is also turned to by most brands only to mop up any last budget left from the annual digital spend. There is more and more experimentation taking place using mobile apps and social concepts to get people sharing, communicating, interacting and advocating.

Many brands declare that Social/Local/Mobile is not high on the agenda because of doubts over whether consumers are ready for products that, for example, rely heavily on their phone GPS and location. When one looks at the massive backlash – just in the Apple community – over the under-performing maps, and the fact that Google’s map application became the fastest downloaded of all time, it shows that location is something relied on heavily and taken for granted by all smartphone users. Therefore it makes all the sense in the world that users will adapt quickly to products that provide them value here.

Many in the digital industry are not seeing what’s coming. Social/Local/Mobile is the new digital, not just a niche channel. It’s soon going to be the primary way to reach and influence consumers which is crucial for brands – just as presently knowing where to target them online in the form of advertising is crucial to them now.

So, if you’re wondering what Social/Local/Mobile is, in the digital marketing world it can be described as the job of creating valuable, useful, entertaining and meaningful products that are accessible on any screen the user just happens to be on at the time. Start-ups in Silicon Valley are focussing on this solely. But it’s perceived as their job to pioneer, and the digital marketing world doesn’t seem to realise that they need to approach their campaign strategies in the same way as these innovators do. Instead of securing marketing budget, they should be securing venture capital! Brands need to be allocating “angel investment” to their agencies to fund and create valuable and meaningful cross-platform products that users will love and use. THIS is digital marketing in 2013 and beyond.

Digital agencies don’t realise they are falling into the same trap as the traditional media agencies did in the 00′s. In this era, most traditional agencies established or acquired a digital arm to ensure they did not lose out. But then it was obvious because of how different digital was to traditional. Now, the SoLoMo concepts look so similar to digital that they can be confused as a specialist niche and underestimated. The reality is that this is not a channel – rather it is the NEW digital that will surpass all else and niche specialists like Gamaroff Digital who are called upon to help facilitate “experiments” in this space will become the thrust behind the digital marketing industry in the next few years.

Smart phones have changed the lives of consumers and it’s happened suddenly. The Social/Local/Mobile concepts played with by start-ups and innovative agencies plug into these changes superbly and are paving the way for a whole new and exciting world of marketing in the years ahead.

Creeping up behind, however, like a thief in the night, is the massive surge in global mobile usage. It’s caught everyone off-guard because mobile has until recently been seen as the domain for downloadable apps, and not “web” applications. People who create apps in the traditional sense make them specifically for mobiles with the purpose of being downloaded and used as mobile apps.

Facebook has made it ever more apparent that there is a gross disconnect between the mobile and desktop worlds, because people get reams of News Feed links to apps on their phone that they cannot access because they’ve been built for desktop.

BlackBerry understands mobile, of course, so it’s no wonder they got it right this time. We at Gamaroff Digital, with our friends at Syncapse, deployed this nifty Facebook application where users could match a funky coloured phone… with their actual clothing! Here users click a button and the app scans their Facebook photos, extracting three pictures in which that user is wearing something of a certain colour. Then a BlackBerry handset in the matching colour is displayed inviting users to make a purchase directly. Cool.

When users click the link:  http://gdlnk.co/22pl, the app recognises what device they are using and then displays the exact same experience, but tailored for that screen size. This goes beyond “responsive design”, which is a term for when apps shuffle and resize dynamically, because apps are not web sites. They have rich functionality and need to be designed and considered specifically for the screen size.

And this also works on all popular operating systems, mobile or desktop. Cross browser, (e.g. IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and handsets too (BlackBerry, iOS, Android and Windows).

You may be wondering why this is so special. You’ve seen mobile apps, and you’ve seen desktop ones. On the surface it looks like we just built lots, probably tying up our development studio for months and costing the client a huge amount. The important thing to note is that all these screens were covered in a fraction of the time it would take if they were built separately. To build a mobile app traditionally, per handset, would have required doing the whole thing practically from scratch per device. To make this particular product cross-screen compliant took probably about 30% of the time it took to build the desktop product. So for 30% extra time spent, we are capturing as much as 50% (and rising) of the otherwise lost audience had we not taken this approach.

Yes, cross-screen deployment of social and online products are becoming quicker and cheaper. But proportionately it is becoming more crucial that we approach all products this way because of the undeniable surge of users on mobile platforms. Of all the money spent on advertising for these products, brands are not realising that as much as half of this spend is being wasted. And it breeds anger among users who cannot see what their friends are sharing because they’re on the move.

Mobile is here to stay. Brands need to deploy multi-screen products and web sites by default and they need to do it in a cost-effective manner. There are ways, you just have to know where to look and which agencies to select before starting your campaign.

Gamaroff Digital are Facebook Preferred Consultants who are specialised in conceptualising and building high quality social and cross-platform experiences for brand engagement.

Instead, it has become an exciting opportunity for those agencies who are passionate about emerging platforms, and who accept the challenge set before them to adapt or die. The world of mobile development has struggled to keep up with the arrival of new devices. When Apple dominated the landscape for a few years, it gave developers plenty of time to learn the heavy and complicated Objective C language required to make native iPhone apps. Then Android came along, those quick to spot Google’s motives then were able to learn how to create products for these platforms.

But what no-one expected was when Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, HTC and Sony Ericsson refused to be beaten and cross platform instantly stopped meaning Desktop and iPhone. Brands were just getting used to the fact that mobile meant doubling their development budgets and then suddenly they helplessly watched as more and more of their audience couldn’t see their campaigns and products. Many brands seem to just stick head in the sand and do everything in their power to ignore when people brandish pie charts in their faces showing that 40% of their audience are not even seeing what they’re spending their marketing budget on.

Well, thankfully that appears to be changing at last. For the very most adaptive and innovative mobile-centric development houses, emerging platforms are now giving way to “converging” platforms. Code written for one platform is tweaked to work on another, probably now more easily than ever before. You just have to know how to think mobile first. Desktop is dead. Even if it’s not really, you have to view it that way. Treat Desktop like an afterthought and you’ll succeed with mobile. It’s not rocket science. Desktop is just one of the multiple platforms we need to be adapting to. If you build desktop web products, then change. You are no longer a desktop developer any more whether you like it or not – and this is by virtue of the fact that your audience don’t use desktop much any more.

Mobile is all there is, and if you build products, you either build them for mobile and adapt sideways to desktop, or you really may as well not do anything at all.

“I’ve never done this before. He Whispers “You need to trust me, turning devices off at the wall is a real turn on” #50ShadesOfGreen”; “”I’ve something to show you upstairs” he says. I’ve never seen anything like it – his solar panels take my breath away#50ShadesOfGreen”.

At first it was received relatively well on Twitter – to be fair to Npower the idea is original and quite funny; something most big corporates are either not very good at or way too stuffy to try.

However, Friends of the Earth – not blind to the fact that Npower is still one of the Big Six energy companies keeping the UK lit up with power derived from fossil fuel (80% of its power in fact) – thought this was a bit rich, and were quick to hijack the hashtag. Bearing in mind that FotE has 45k+ followers compared to Npower’s 3k, it began using the #50ShadesOfGreen hashtag together with its own, #getCBE (Clean British Energy). The result was the same dodgy faux-erotica, however this time outlining just how “dirty” the use of fossil fuel is:

“’Say it again’, he said. ‘Coal is not a shade of green’, whimpered the woman from @npowerhq #50shadesofgreen #getCBE”, and “Oh @npower – you’re so DIRTY! No but seriously: you really are, very very dirty. http://bit.ly/MdLJHL #50shadesofgreen” – you catch their drift. This actually got more press than the original campaign, given that even hardened hacks do the gleeful girly handclap when a corporate campaign backfires.

Unfortunately as far as Twitter campaigns that rely on the goodwill of your audience go (the Twitter audience is well-versed and cynical), if you’re a big corporate, chances are you became that way by either steam-rollering the small folk or trashing the environment. As such, lots of people will be angry with you and any attempt at a do-good social campaign will be met with apathy and disdain. At least in Npower’s defence it was creative in its approach, unlike the uninspired and frankly crap #McDStories campaign which tanked on a global scale. If people got shit on you, they will always use it to shit on you from a great height.

This all sounds very discouraging for brands whose histories are steeped in trickery and malaise. However, everyone deserves a fair innings in the marketing sphere, so brands really just need to know their limits when it comes to their level of proclaimed virtue. First and foremost if you’re a fuel company, come on now…NEVER use the word ‘green’ in your campaigns, no matter how wracked with guilt you are that you exist. That’s just asking for trouble. Better to focus more on the small steps YOU are taking to make the world a better place (only if that’s what you’re doing, of course). Secondly, never underestimate how low your audience will go. If you can picture it in the far-reaching dungeons of your dirty mind, people will go there. Be warned. But don’t let it strip you of your sense of fun.

The #RonaldoLIVE football challenge

Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo boasts the 13th most Liked fan page on Facebook with over 44 million fans and is by far the most popular sportsperson on Facebook.

On 17th May 2012 we launched an app for Castrol Edge with our friends at M&C Saatchi. Built as a real-time interactive experience, Ronaldo fans around the world had the chance to put his skills to the test in a live football challenge through our #RonaldoLive app.

The challenge gave fans the experience of playing football ‘one-on-one’ with Ronaldo. During the live stream, randomly selected users had the chance to pick one of four surrounding goals in the studio in Madrid. The chosen fan’s name and profile picture were displayed beneath the live stream for all to see as they were handed the controls. Their selection triggered a ball to fall from an overhead chute which Ronaldo would aim at the chosen goal in response to their challenge.

We made sure the campaign gathered momentum during the run-up to the live event by providing fans with a platform to submit questions to Ronaldo, the best of which were put to him during the live stream.

Using one-off, real-time events with live content in this way is an excellent way for brands with a very high active fan count to effect a spike in user activity which will help to ensure their continued engagement over time.

Given the many millions followers that Ronaldo has access to, the app attracted a huge amount of attention and experienced a massive surge in usage throughout the 15 minute broadcast.

The Campaign for a Name app was commissioned by Country Time to capture the hype around the current US presidential elections with a campaign-themed competition where users can enter their own suggestions or ‘nominations’ for names that they would like to see as the new nickname of the drink. Together with our friends at A4R4, we created an app which allows users to enter their nomination, see what it would look like on the side of the can and share to their wall and get their friends to vote for it. Users can browse entries and vote for their favourites, as well as comment and share. Three well-known US celebrities are on board garnering support for the campaign and will each pick their favourite entry to lobby for during the second stage of the campaign.

Country Time Campaign for a Name

The product was a great example of social leading the whole campaign. All activity is being conducted on Facebook, with an additional ‘Celebrity Chatter’ page pulling in related Facebook, Twitter and YouTube content. Gamaroff is proud to have contributed by building an application for Country Time that is slick, social and user-friendly.

Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer program

Gamaroff Digital has just been awarded a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) badge. We were previously part of Facebook’s Preferred Developer Consultant Program which Facebook has now merged with its Marketing API Program (MAP). These two groups make up the new PMD program, whose aim is to better represent the various technologies in the Facebook ecosystem and to recognise companies that develop holistic solutions.

Facebook’s PMD program mission is to help developers build products that make social marketing easier and more effective.

We have been awarded the Apps badge under the new PMD program, meaning that we have been approved in services and platforms for building socially enabled integrations – customised or self service.

Gamaroff has been recommended by Facebook as a Preferred Consultant since January 2010 and so close was the relationship that we were commissioned to build the new lookup tool for the PMD Directory. We worked with Facebook to build the rich application which details the full list of agencies in the program.

In combining the PDC program with the Marketing API program, 141 more companies have been added to the PMD list making it a truly global community that includes parts of the world not previously represented. Gamaroff Digital started out as one of just 40 preferred consultants in the early days of the program, so our inclusion in the new PMD list is an achievement borne of our continued work in creating meaningful and pioneering social experiences on the Facebook platform.