digiday:APPS Recap: The Distribution and Discovery of a Better Branded App

Moderator Dan Frommer, Senior Editor of Silicon Alley Insider guided audience members on a tour of the complex and cluttered app market and then challenged a panel comprised of a news publisher, a wireless carrier, a software development house, a PR agency, and two ad networks to provide strategies and tactics to connect consumers to brands.  The big question is – how does this translate into revenue to pay for the market development funds behind an app strategy?  

There are over 50,000 applications available today in the app market, making it much tougher to get a newly released app noticed and discovered by users. 

Benjamin Mosse, Director, AP Mobile of the Associated Press seems to own a complex curiosity streak that has taken him from the study of bio sciences in molecular genetics through web development and Internet hardware/software implementations in Europe to our shores where he now exploits the latest technology advances in mobile to deliver news-on-demand to the AP readership.

Mosse says to Go viral when it comes to increasing the revenue funnel for your app.  Make sure your marketing support for your mobile application has a viral component such as YouTube.

Jennifer Byrne, Director of Business Development from Verizon paid her dues in entertainment companies such as CBS and EMI/Capitol before joining mobile full force at mForma/Hands-On then jumping aboard Verizon to head-up V CAST video and social media.

Byrne thinks that when it comes to how brands should choose an app publisher or decide on an app to sell/market, marketers need to consider the functionality and usage activity that is relevant to the brand.

To help marketers, Verizon has partnered with Softbank and Vodafone to reach a billion handsets by setting standardization in methodologies to achieve scale for advertisers – but within that billion there is still tremendous fragmentation of handset owners.  Thus functionality and usage activity are critical to the understanding of the consumer audience for brands.

Steve Rosenblatt, SVP Sales of Quattro Wireless is a career sales executive in the digital space having helmed revenue growth at Maxim Digital and contributing to the build-out of MusicVision and AmericanGreetings.com.

The brand message delivered on mobile achieves a higher recall than online.  Why?  Because of the limited real estate to make visual impact on the mobile screen and because of the smaller data pipe than online, creative requires the rigor of simplicity.  The results.  Simple is memorable.

Vijay Chattha, Chief Talker at AppLaunchPR- founded this year, describes himself as an appnologist.  Prior to AppLaunchPR, Vijay focused on providing consulting on integrated marketing, the development of counter-culture metro guides in several countries, and work at the Smithsonian on the cultures of India.

Chattha believes word-of-mouth marketing can easily happen with mobile but Dan Frommer sees F2F as a hurdle because there are so many of the same apps in the same category and we all know some of them. 

Steve Siegel, Mobile Solution Specialist at Microsoft Advertising joins the company from HipCricket and enPocket, now Nokia Interactive.  However, before all the media selling, Siegel was a media buyer in the digital space.

Siegel thinks mobile web on the mobile device will evolve so that native applications won't be as necessary as they are today..  Verizon’s Byrne points out that GPS needs a native API.  And, mobile local/ hyper local is increasingly leveraging GPS.  The next big focus most everyone at the show agreed upon is local, local, local.

Tony Nethercutt, VP Sales of AdMob has been around the ground floor of newly built blocks of web marketing for a number of great runs – at DoubleClick, Yahoo!, and YouTube before helming sales at AdMob.  He paid his dues in TV sales in San Diego at Lemon Grove based ABC news in the 1980s when San Diego was a sleepy town and an hour long 5 -O’clock newscast covered 4 local stories and the newscasters were the biggest celebrities in town.

When asked by Frommer if brands that sponsor apps should also become publishers, Nethercutt stated that he believes that it all depends on the goals.  Is the brand going to be in the business of apps and needing different apps over the long tail?  If so, becoming a publisher might be an interesting investment.  BTW, Ad Mob covers the stat back-feeds of 65% of all iPhones.