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This week:

• Ten hot food trends for 2009
• New ways to promote road safety
• Street lights on demand via mobile
• Online retailers gaining favour
• A clever way to monetize social media

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I make no apologies for coming back to the subject of great mobile innovation on this blog. There’s just far too much great stuff out there not to share!

So, here’s a few more things that have appeared this week.

Firstly, how about using your phone as a projector?

A company called Microvision has developed a projector designed to fit inside any mobile device, or an iPod, or a laptop – anywhere really. It can project in any size from A4 right up to the equivalent of a 254-centimetre TV – about as big as the largest commercially available TV (if you’re a billionaire).  What’s more amazing is, it’s always in focus – there’s no manual focusing required.  It has to be seen to be believed, so I strongly recommend you check out this video.

Secondly, how about using your phone as a mouse?

Using your phone as a mouse doesn’t seem like much sense while sitting at your PC, but as living rooms converge a mouse will be required more and more while you’re sitting on the couch. Enter the mobile air mouse, an iPhone app that turns your phone into a mouse:

Mobile Air Mouse uses the built in accelerometer to translate your hand motions into mouse movements on your screen. It can also operate as a trackpad, allowing you to control your computer with a single finger.

I don’t know about you, but I want one.

Applications are now open for submissions to the next installment of More Mobile Goodness!

I’d like to start this blog post with a quote:

“Online advertising is not, by any stretch, always direct-response advertising. In the offline world, media analysts don’t think of an immediate reaction to TV or print ad.” – ComScore CEO Gian Fulgoni

Indeed. Why is it that we place such high expectations on the impact of online advertising compared to offline?

The obvious answer is, of course, measurability. It is precisely because we can tell exactly how many people have clicked on an ad, what proportion of impressions were clicked, and how many acquisitions have resulted from those clicks that we expect so much of online advertising.

The loser in this equation, unfortunately, is the online publisher. While Google reaps the rewards of gazillions of clicks on their search ads, too little has been asked of the impact of how the Googler got there in the first place. Sure, it might have been TV, radio or word of mouth. But it could have just as easily been because they saw an online display ad at a news, entertainment or social networking site.

The argument in favour of publishers and the power of online branding via display ads has struggled in the past, from simple lack of evidence. But things are starting to change.

Last year, the Australian Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) released a long-awaited study which found:

Intention to purchase Sultana Bran increased an impressive 37 percent and brand consideration increased 17 percent when consumers were exposed to online ads versus a control group not exposed to any of the Sultana Bran creative online.

More recent research from Comscore in the USA has found that:

Online ads, even when they didn’t result in a click, increased a consumer’s likelihood of making a purchase at an advertiser’s retail store by 17% and increased visits to a marketer’s website by an average of 40%.

So there you have it. But how can publishers get a better deal from advertisers for being the important conduit they appear to be?

One way is through better attribution of purchase to previous exposure to online advertising. Technology like Microsoft’s Atlas Engagement Mapping is working to track a user journey from exposure through to research and final purchase. For a great read, check out their report “The Long Road To Conversion: The Digital Purchase Funnel” [PDF].

The moral of this story? Don’t assume your online ad campaign hasn’t strengthened your brand on the basis of how many clicks you’ve received… unless you’re willing to write off your TV and radio campaign in the same way!

Over the last 12 months, the idea of social media being a highly important, if not essential, part of any brand’s marketing communications strategy has come to seem like common sense to me. However, working every day with brands who have taken up the challenge can admittedly put the blinkers on to the reality of what most brands know about, or actually do with, social media in Australia.

A new survey from the USA (unfortunately reported at AdNews behind a login) pours cold water on the notion that Australia is embracing social media:

Although… 67% of Australian executives regard their company’s reputation as vulnerable, the majority is blind to the blogosphere and unaware of what consumers and ex-employees may be saying about them in Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and other social sites.

Two-thirds (66%) were either unaware or did not want to admit that employees were badmouthing their employers online. Only 10% thought it would be helpful to build relationships with influential bloggers. Less than one in four (38%) had searched their own name online in the month prior to the survey looking for tell-tale signs of gripe.

This is bad. Very, very bad. In an age where it is so easy to put your ‘ear to the ground’ and listen, using tools like BCM’s own BuzzHound, there is little excuse for brands being so blissfully unaware of the opportunities (and threats) for their brand. And this is the bare minimum of what brands should be doing – most should be moving far beyond this into acting and influencing in the social media space.

So, why the Australian social media malaise? Is it because there have been too few highly-publicised examples of social media success with an Australian brand? Possibly. I am reminded of the challenge laid down by a prominent Australian blogger last year: To get a CMO/CEO of a blue chip Company to state the success of an Australian Social Media Strategy in The Financial Review in 2009.

As far as I know, nobody is yet to take him up on the offer, and based on the findings of the recent research, we might be waiting another year until somebody does.

There can hardly be a better example of how innovation goes nuts when you crowdsource global talent than the Apple iPhone App Store. I expect we will look back on the early years of the iPhone app store as a truly revolutionary period of mobile phone usage.

Let’s take a look at one area where Apple probably least expected apps to go: musical instruments. According to almost every news outlet I frequent, including the Sydney Morning Herald, the world is currently going nuts over the iPhone Ocarina -- an app that not only lets you play this whimsical instrument on your iPhone (by blowing into the microphone no less),  but also lets you listen in to what others are playing the world over, thus adding that vital social element.

Take a look at the Ocarina in action:

This is just the beginning. A Canadian DJ and producer called Deadmau5 recently offered up his entire latest album for his fans to remix via a dedicated iPhone app. A Japanese band called Denki Groove play all their instruments via iPhone. Such instruments include the piano, drums and guitar.

For those of us who prefer a bit of noodling around with other people’s music, there’s always the mixmaster app to scratch up a storm, or a four-track mixing console.

I think it’s pretty clear where all this is heading -- pretty soon you’ll be able to hook up with another muso anywhere in the world and jam away to your heart’s delight. Good times.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems bricks and mortar retailers with an online presence are lagging far, far behind their online counterparts in executing an effective search engine marketing strategy. A recent study in the US found that 30% of search results for retail goods were online retailers, compared to just 12% for bricks and mortar retailers. This is sure to be worrying for the b’n'm retailers, who rely on their strong offline brand to drive traffic to their online presence. The study examined search results for products across many categories: digital cameras, power drills, gaming systems, MP3Players, snow blowers, strollers, treadmills, TVs, GPS systems, and watches.

So I decided to do a bit of quasi-research for myself to check on the situation in Australia. I searched Google Australia for two products – a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX37 digital camera, and a Seiko Kinetic Auto Relay watch – and analysed the first two pages of results.

Here’s what happened (number of mentions):

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It seems the situation in Australia is even more dire than in the USA. Online retailers dominate search results in Australia – and shopping comparison sites dominate even moreso than in the USA, which is interesting, considering our local versions are far less developed. Bricks and mortar retailers barely rate a mention.

In a country where retailers like Harvey Norman are still wondering whether the e-commerce is the future and most others have half-hearted online presences, this is hardly surprising. If bricks and mortar retailers are to compete online, most of them need to get the basics right – a SEO and SEM strategy is a good start. The future looks bright for savvy online retailers who’ve forged a path into our credit cards via our computers.

It’s not often I see something online and go “now THAT is cool” – like the first time I saw Google Earth in action years ago. But I did today. Even though I haven’t seen it in real life, it looks incredibly like something that is truly the way of the future.

ING Bank in Holland have released a mobile phone app that tells you where to find the closest ATM. Sound boring? Yes, until you realise that it shows you exactly how to get there, via a GPS and compass, overlaid in real time onto your surroundings. So now instead of having to look for a street sign, or wondering whether to go left or right, you simply follow the arrow… straight to your destination.

The image below shows an example of how it works (imagine you are holding your phone in front of you, with the image coming through the phone camera and onto your screen):

Trust a bank to be the first to develop such a thing, but I’m sure you can see it’s practicality for almost everything – finding a hospital, your car, or a friend is about to become incredibly easy. I can particularly see how useful it could be in reverse – like letting a friend know exactly where you are.

Incredible!

Is it just me, or is the ‘pay what you like’ concept becoming increasingly common? A few high-profile examples in the news over the last week or so have led me to believe we might be seeing more of it in the future.

At the moment, it’s hard to tell whether some brands are offering their consumers the chance to pay the price they see fit as a genuine pricing strategy, or whether it’s just a PR stunt, or both. The most famous example, going back to 2007, was Radiohead’s offer to fans to pay whatever they saw fit for their most recent album, In Rainbows.

In London, a high-end restaurant by the name of Little Bay is serving customers and insisting they pay what they like. He readily admits that he’s doing it as a means of alleviating some stress from the recession, but it’s proved to generate incredible PR. The owner said:

“Even if people don’t pay anything I have told my staff to treat them the same as if they pay £50 or £60-a-head.

“It’s entirely up to each customer whether they give £100 or a penny. All I’m asking is they pay me what they think the food and service is worth.

Meanwhile, in Singapore, Accor Hotels is running a promotion doing much the same thing, but with an online twist:

Through March 15, the pay-what-you-want competition runs during a designated portion of each day, as announced on the hotel’s site. Interested consumers need only sign up as members and make a bid for the price they’d like to pay during one of the announced promotion times. If they’re one of the first to bid, they can win a night at the hotel at exactly the price they offered. Bids have gone as high as SGD100, and the first promotional rooms sold out within minutes of the contest’s launch last Wednesday.

So… is this the start of a genuine change in attracting consumers? A blatant PR stunt? Or a little bit of both?

And what’s next… pay-what-you-want advertising perhaps?

While I didn’t have the opportunity to watch the number one US sporting event of the year live, the 2009 Super Bowl has certainly provided a plethora of case studies into how offline and online advertising are converging, and continue to bring new light into how we interact and even define social media.   With advertisers spending on average USD$100,000/second, online data with the right analysis can deliver some understanding into what all the fuss is about and why, even in difficult economic times, these spots continue to attract top dollar.

Take for example the New York Times ‘Twitter Chatter’ tool, which very neatly mapped the tweets by location and frequency of commonly used words in Super Bowl messages, particularly chatter about the ads. It’s interesting to note the progression of just how much the marketing associated with the event has become almost as important as the event itself.

If Twitter is one barometer then certainly YouTube is another.  YouTube set up a dedicated channel called AdBlitz 2009 where users could vote on their favourite ads.  Winners from this vote  included Doritos in the number one spot with their “Free Doritos” ad, E*TRADE with it’s singing babies and CareerBuilder.com’s “When to find a new job” ad in the top three.

Doritos also appear to have gained a whopping 80% bump in search volume compared to the period leading up to the Super Bowl according to Google’s Insight for Search tool, no doubt supported by their open approach to their marketing which invited Doritos aficionados to ‘Crash The Super Bowl’ by creating ads – the winner got to take home a cool $1million.

While this is all very interesting, advertisers are continuing to try to harness the data to provide insight into just what the return on investment from social media exercises may be.  The Groundswell Blog featured one methodology which compared the Tweets of approximately 70 people in relation to a brand and attempted to marry those to the comments the ad incited – be it positive or negative to come up with a sort of ‘net promoter’ score.

No doubt there are plenty of other fascinating tools that have been developed by advertisers and interested spectators alike, all very likely to be reporting any number of different results as to who the real winners from Super Bowl advertising investments were.  As marketers continue to navigate within the social media landscape more and more ways to measure these interactions will continue to develop.  Until then, it certainly is fun to post analyse, and there is much that can be learned from the experiments of others in applying to your own brands advertising impact online.  I’d love to hear if you’ve come across any other interesting ways to analyse social media, Super Bowl related or not.

Hats off to UK media agency Curb who wasted no time taking advantage of London’s recent snow storm by launching what is probably a world first… snowvertising!

Within the space of hours Curb had created laser-cut stencils and hit the streets to stamp over 3,500 impressions of sports brand Extreme’s logo all over the London snowfall.

And the best part of all? The logos melted away into the air, leaving no environmental impact at all.

An amazing and fascinating effort! And just one in a long line of new ‘green’ advertising techniques that have sprung up, including street ‘cleanvertising‘:

Whereby dirty footpaths are stencilled with a high-pressure hose to create ads from dirt… literally!

So, have any readers of Two Cents seen anything similar in Australia yet?