Direct Marketing & Digital Marketing Agency - Ashley Bolser Agency

There are some big changes coming in the UK towards the end of this year and nobody is doing anything about it! Yet…

What’s going on?

The Government is committed to saving 1p in every pound it spends, before the end of this year, that probably equates to 3 or 4p in the budget it has left to spend, and its only the start.

There are big changes coming and we in marketing should be thinking about preparing for them. The cuts are going to be big and they are going to hurt. Not just the lovies in marketing and advertising but to the man and woman in the street.

There’s going to be a sudden realisation, that sooner than we imagined, our state benefit is to be removed or cut back, overtime cancelled, our jobs taken away. Our pensions cut.

People are going to get nervous, nervous about spending money, nervous about the future. The papers are going to have a field day with “I told you so” smugness and confidence is going to ebb away from the economy and society, as the real impact of that nostalgic word “austerity” comes home to roost.

In the credit crunch those who suffered were, the bankers, the hedge fund managers, property magnates. The greedy. The new austerity will be harder and more bitter than it was before. This time it’s going to be the average worker who is going to fund the previous excess and suffer the radical changes that are afoot.

What will this mean?

A Fin du Siècle approach by many. We’re going to party hard up to the end of the year and to continue the metaphor, we’ll get a huge hangover in January 2011.VAT will also be up, driving sales volume in December. All the sales will begin in early December and there’ll be a great big hole in spending in January.

What should we do?

Sell eggs and flour. Home baking boomed in the credit crunch, Restaurants and pubs did badly.

Do vouchers, last time even the rich and famous used money off vouchers, we know, we did the biggest and best, Pizza Express.
(Speak to us and we’ll tell you how to do it properly.)

Get back to the basics, do what you do well at a good price, be reassuring, plan properly, save money, be effective.
Export stuff to America, we’re relatively cheap now…

Stay digital, its cost effective, entertaining and relatively cheap for people to use.

In the long run there will still be a massive market for lots of things, Luxury still will be the new necessity, we may just put off purchases that are not essential, but values like family and security will always be important. In two years, for many people, this will just be a slightly uncomfortable memory.

Since our first foray into mobile app development in 2008 with Symbian & the Nokia connectors application, we’ve seen a massive increase in projects and clients interested in developing their own applications. We’ve got some really interesting apps we’ve been developing recently for all types of handsets with vastly different functions inc. image recognition, API, GPS & geo-location, for some big clients - all very exciting!

And since the iPhone, there has been an incredible explosion on the iTunes app store, Nokia’s Ovi store is becoming a big player,  Vodafone are jumping on the bandwagon and lots of other network providers and third parties have emerging app stores. However, this rapid adoption has lead me to ask some questions -

• How long is the app rush going to last?
• What is the future of mobile apps?
• Where are we headed?
• Is this really the business/mobile model of the future?

Mobile apps and their stores have been great for leveraging the recent shift from mobile phones to mobile computing, and really signaling the future  of digital technology - but they do have some inherent problems-

• Publishers rely on third party platforms
• Publishing and approval process
• A needle in a haystack
• Dedicated application and API development an added cost
• No one technology really pervasive over all the mobile platforms
• Costly development and update cycles

What do they give us?

• Reduced data requirements
• Better integration of phone hardware - GPS, Camera
• Embedded interfaces
• UI ‘Bling’
• Monetisation of content/service

However, comparing mobile apps with it’s bigger brother, the desktop, we can do all this in a web browser today without the need to develop unique apps for different computers etc. Google already have there own suite of apps, Microsoft are moving the office suite into the browser. With the great leaps in browser technology (xHTML, CSS3, HTML5, jScript libraries) we’ve seen photo editing, multi-track audio recording, video editing and lots of previously installable applications all move to the browser without any OS dependency.  We are even going to see the OS move to the browser when Google Chrome OS is released.

And this is where mobile apps will end up - in the browser. 4g networks, wi-max and demise of data-charges will allow us to move back to HTML technology and allow publishers/developers to build once and deploy across all device and ultimately gain back control. That’s not to say that Bolser are going to stop developing mobile apps, but we won’t be taking our eye of the bigger picture either.

And yes, the web will win! In fact it already has.

Myself and Rich made a trip down to London last week for the Open Mobile Summit. 2 days of keynotes and panel discussions covering all aspects of mobile technology, from carriers to handset manufacturers, and app developers to content providers.

We were there primarily as ambassadors for Nokia who had their own ‘Nokia Lounge’ area for us to showcase some of the apps we’ve been developing for their phones. We seemed to generate a lot of interest, particularly for our forthcoming app ‘PriceGenie’ - a barcode scanning, price comparison tool which has been developed specifically for the N900 using Nokia’s latest technology: ‘Nokia QT’.

When we weren’t demoing apps to people and comparing notes with other developers (and praying the WiFi connection held up) – we tried to get to as many of the presentations as possible – some highlights being a talk from Richard Windsor (Sr. Analyst, Nomura Securities) on open mobile ecosystems and another on mobile experience from Mark Rolston (CEO, frog design).

Nokia Lounge - Open Mobile Summit 2010, London