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.

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.

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

But what if you’re not in the mood for pizza?

If the Creatives are asked to add value to your brief, instead of providing versions, they’ll think of different ways to satisfy your hunger. They’ll consider all the influences on the decision, including how much money you have to spend, how much time there is and how to get the most satisfaction for these. At the end of this process, there may be two very different yet equally appetising restaurant suggestions. They’ll present both ideas and talk you through how each experience differs. You can then choose the one with the menu that most tickles your tastebuds.

Ask the Creatives to give you versions and you’ll get a menu. Ask them to add value and you’ll receive the Michelin Guide. One can be picked up for free almost anywhere. The other is worth paying for.

Not surprising because they all have them, but it’s a small segment of the market.

Here at Bolser headquarters we know that the iPhone is a very important “totemic” device but it’s not the most important Brand in the market, that honour goes to Nokia because more people in the UK and in the world have them!

There are some really important things to consider when planning an App rather than flying in and producing one…

Here’s my quick checklist for Mobile Applications:

• Do you have a serious need for the App, or is it a gimmick (This is ok just be honest with yourself)
• Can you build a business case that makes money from a mobile App? – Either from a paid app or from increases in sales?
• Will customers actually use the app rather than the mobile web? And does the app improve the general usage experience?
• Does the App encourage user interaction? 
• Is it a one off or ongoing usage?  Most Apps are downloaded and used just a few times!
• Does your target market have the latest Google Android or Apple iPhone? What phone should you develop for?

The other question to ask is who should develop the thing?

I’m biased because that answer should be Bolser, here’s why:

• We’ve done lots of them, over 150k downloads so far
• We understand both the business need and the consumer perspective
• We know what the phones can do!
• We know about getting consumers to interact with brands so it’s not dry brand exposure or ultra technical backend stuff

There are some really lovely Applications that will integrate with lots of aspects of the phone, Nokia’s gig finder is one of them, Why?

• It checks the music you have on the phone and the ones you play
• It knows your location from the GPS built in to the phone
• It references your local venues to see when gigs are happening and when the people you like are playing
• It finds available tickets from the largest ticket companies on the net, like Ticket Master and Seatwave.
• It allows you to interact with their systems to book

What a lovely App from Nokia Betalabs http://betalabs.nokia.com/apps/gig-finder

We’re producing some super technical Apps and looking for major brand partners so why not get in touch and see what we can do for you….

Ashley

Web Frameworks

• The majority of web applications we build use the Ruby on Rails framework. This allows us to get projects up and running in a small space of time without reinventing the wheel each time.
• For smaller projects we use Sinatra, a small DSL for writing simple web applications. Sinatra is a lot leaner than Rails so is great for high traffic services like API’s.

Plugins and Gems

We use lots of open source rubygems and plugins to avoid reinventing the wheel on every project. A selection of our favourites are:

• Authlogic - a framework agnostic library for adding authentication into your application.
• Haml - A templating engine which focuses on improving the syntax of Markup. Haml uses indentation to determine when you want HTML tags to start/end. You therefore don’t actually need end tags, lowering the number of lines of code you need to use.
• Paperclip - easily add support for file uploads within your application
• Nokogiri is what we use for parsing any HTML or XML. when doing any API integration.
• Comma allows you to declare the structure of a CSV file on your model. You can then just call to_csv on a collection to have the data in CSV format.
• Friendly Id allows you to declare a search engine friendly slug for your ActiveRecord models. The slugs are versioned so that old ones redirect to new ones.
• Geokit is great for any location based sites. It allows you to Geocode your models and find them based on location.
• Simple Form - If you just want to quickly add a contact form to your site, this gem makes it a 5 minute job.

Javascript

We have experimented with a number of Javascript frameworks. Jquery seems to be our framework of choice now because of its number of useful plugins and nice syntax.

Testing

We practice test driven development which helps us to write better code, minimise bugs, and make changes without the fear of breaking everything. The libraries that we use are:

• Rspec is a behaviour driven development framework for allowing you to describe how things should work before you build them.
• Cucumber is an integration testing library that allows you to describe the overall behaviour of your application in plain text. You then write ruby code that interprets these steps in the background. Cucumber uses Webrat, a headless browser to crawl the application and make sure that what you want to happen does happen. Cucumber also hooks up with a number of other web browsers so it can even test that javascript/ajax works.
• Using fixtures in testing is fine for small projects but this can often get messy and difficult to manage as the application grows. To get around this, we use the Machinist gem which allows you to define blueprints for a model and create objects with the parameters that you want directly in your test case.
• Email Spec is a collection of Rspec and Cucumber matchers that make it easy to test that your application sends emails when it should.
• We use Shoulda Macros within Rspec which make it easy to test simple cases in 1 line of test code.

Version Control

• We use Git as our version control system of choice. The fact that Git makes branching so easy means we can have multiple versions of sites running at once without any issues. We all work on separate branches and merge changes into the master branch when necessary.
• We store all our repositories at Github
• Any small scripts, we store as a Gist

Deploying

• Capistrano is the tool that we use to deploy our websites and applications. Capistrano connects to your server via SSH, clones the project in a new folder and updates a symbolic link to make that new folder live.
• We use Webistrano which is basically a web interface for Capistrano. We set up all of our projects in Webistrano which allows us to deploy with a few clicks and see deployment history.

Text Editors

• The editor of choice for the developers seems to be TextMate. Textmate has a number of bundles that really help develpment. A few that we use are:
  • rspec-tmbundle - allows you to run a Rspec file or single test case from within Textmate rather than having to use the command line.
  • cucumber-tmbundle - Similar to the rspec bundle but for Cucumber
  • ack-tmbundle - Global search in a project but very fast
  • github-tmbundle - Great for quickly backing up a script as a Gist at Github
  • ruby-haml.tmbundle - Support for the haml
• We also use Vim for editing any configuration files etc on our remote servers.

He has reportedly received many photographs of this new cloud variety from members all over the world. Could it be that due to global climate change we’re witnessing a new weather phenomenon? Or is it because of the proliferation and portability of digital cameras that such moments are captured and forwarded to one and then the many.

Maybe there aren’t new things happening with clouds, just new ways of seeing the sky. So if we want to be innovating for the brands we work for, we should stop looking for something new and try looking for new ways of seeing instead.

Marketing as dialogue
Not just transmission of, but reception of ideas
This trend will lead to more consumer generated advertising in which the consumer is not just the star but leads the creative as well, not new but will develop over the year.   http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/news/808509/Brand-Barometer—Sony-camera-ad-clicks-right-boxes/
And by the way, TRUTH will become very important in these types of ads…

This ties in to
Democratic Product Development
Customer builds their own product, this already happens with AUDI, I went to the factory and found out that no two cars come off the production line the same. The logistics of this are mind boggling and vastly impressive. The same could be true of a mobile phone. The customer could choose the camera they want,  the memory they want, the tunes and applications they want. The cover they want, the keys, size, battery etc. upload photos and contacts to be pre-loaded with personal photo on case.

Change the system
Revolution not evolution
The world is changing, the traditional methods of doing business are falling away. This means that the old ways of charging are in decline. Take music, it used to be about charging for delivery of creativity. Now delivery is free and it’s getting harder to charge for creativity. Live music experiences are the place  bands/artists can make money because they can’t be reproduced digitally.
The same is happening with film/TV/video.
We believe there’s scope for a revolution in the charging structure of most services, including mobile phones.
Consumers would pay what they feel a product or service deserves. Like Radiohead’s album on the internet, people paid what they thought it was worth and what the band deserved for the music. We don’t know if it was successful but the PR coverage alone was probably worth it.
Our idea is to get people to pay what they feel is fair and reasonable for things like books, video and even porn.
Why not get famous for deconstructing the standard business models!

Trusted editors and selectors
The rise of mediation (or you only get to see/hear about things you are interested in)
Too much choice, too little time. Not enough knowledge
We like it, a trusted third party recommends what you might like based on knowledge, Artificial Intelligence or an understanding of you.
We all love consumer reviews and can make the distinction between brand/company sponsored stuff and the real thing.
Look at Trip Advisor, Reevoo, spotify etc. all growing massively along with the rise in importance of word of mouth from friends.
Also this ties in to the growth of devices which screen out things we don’t like (SKY +, Tivo, Itunes etc.)

Applications built on the back of social media
Artificial trend engines
http://be-a-magpie.com very interesting advertising Twitter site
Also
http://thunderthimble.com/
Same idea across lots of other media, called Thunder Thimble the other day that allows you to track a brand’s popularity on the web. It currently supports just Twitter but they have plans to extend it to watch other stuff. Simple thing is to advertise but there’s more that can be done here to map trends, influence the agenda etc.
This is really hot at the moment.
Also Qik will become the new Twitter, instead of 160 characters people will Qik video live to the internet, and it’s on Nokia’s web site, Ovi already.

Marketing Applications that suit your way of life
Helpful things on your mobile phone
App downloads are big business.
There’s an obsession with healthy lifestyles, so develop  scanning devices on mobile phones – can be used to scan food products throughout the day to calculate calories/fat.
We thought about developing this to an app that shows how balanced your life is, tie in with GPS on your phone, heart rate monitor, and log what you eat and where using the bar code scanner linked to a bar code database.
This would give you an all round check of calories burned consumed etc.
Fun approach would be to get people to rate the balance of items consumed against, good for you, good for the planet, money, happy etc.

Cloud based applications
Get all the power of a super computer in your hand
Cloud computing uses the distributed computing power of tens of thousands of connected devices to deliver great software to the phone, perhaps providing a computer generated cartoon of your photo interacting inside a virtual game.
No single device has the power by itself but together they could do so,
Massive social good programmes like the search for the cure for genetic disease would be done on loads of connected computers and phones.

Austerity, Make do and mend culture, what are we doing about this? EDF “this ad was made from recycled film clips” “this ad was made from recycled ideas…”

Green is a way of life not an outward statement

We all know that the majority of the time designs, functionality and objectives will inevitably change (and usually essential) throughout the course of a projects lifecycle. It dawned on me that our ability to adapt to these changes without continually impacting deadlines and budgets is all about being Agile, and that we have already adopted these principles to some extent.

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.
• Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
• Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

So how do we achieve this?  Well, it’s all about making the right technology decisions; such as implementing collaborative working tools GitHub and Lighthouse, and using an agile development language & platform such as Ruby On Rails. These choices combine to provide the perfect platform for the digital team to be Agile in our development, meet the clients changing requirements whilst maintaining budgets and deadlines.