But how do you go about selling the apps themselves (whether the app is free or paid)?

How do you maximize app downloads on a modest budget?

It’s worth noting that launching apps is a relatively new discipline, one with a scattered set of learnings and best practices. At OgilvyOne, we’ve combined a scan of various successful approaches used by apps in the past with our knowledge of digital campaign launches to create a composite of tactics we believe would be successful for the launch of any mobile app.  In this post, we will provide a few examples of these tactics.

Let’s first explore how people discover apps. Generally, there are five different ways they do so:

1)     Browsing the App Store and finding apps that match a need they’ve identified

2)     Recommendations from friends, family, and co-workers

3)     Stumbling upon the apps that are highest rated in the app store

4)     Actively researching to find out which apps are most popular

5)     Learning about an app through online or offline ads

We also know that there’s a limited time frame for success. Topping the charts is easiest to achieve at launch when there is a high volume of app downloads within a few days, and you only get one chance at a first impression. Momentum can be lost by not compressing marketing activity around the time of launch, and greater investment would be required to achieve success well after an app has launched.

PRE-LAUNCH, it’s all about creating awareness and excitement for the upcoming app, and – if applicable – gathering contact information so that those interested can be contacted at launch. A landing page with information on the upcoming app is an ideal place to drive people and capture data before the app is launched. And what better way to build momentum and generate buzz on that landing page than with a truly compelling demo video.

Check out this demo video for Inkling. While the subject of the video may not be an app itself, it’s an entertaining AND educational piece of creative that tells the product’s story, makes you want to get it (I don’t even draw, yet I am considering it), and is highly shareable (see: the over 2 million video views).
AT-LAUNCH is when you’ll want your paid media push, and it’s important that you target this media on the devices that the app will be used on. Minimizing the amount of clicks (or in this case, finger pushes) between advertisement and download will maximize conversion and downloads – so if you’re launching an iPad app, your paid search and/or display and/or in-app advertising should be targeted to iPad users.

POST-LAUNCH, there are several things brands can do within the app itself to continue to generate downloads. In-app reminders & updates are often under-utilized touchpoints that are available within all apps, and brands can use these to ask users to rate their app. And integrating social functionality (e.g. share, “like,” tweet, email) into the app ensures that users have a seamless way of spreading the word.

As with anything in life, timing is key when launching an app.  You need to strike a balance of building enough excitement before launch and not losing momentum as the app launches. You need to get consistent feedback once the app is in-market, and make decisions about what needs to be optimized and when. But if your app launch strategy is sound – and if the app itself provides some real entertainment or utility to its users – a brand can avoid the dreaded result of creating an app that simply gets lost in the clutter.

Andrew Teie is Senior Strategist, Digital Strategy at Ogilvy & Mather in New York City.

Follow him on Twitter: @andrewteie

Shoppers have become digitally liberated, embracing and assimilating technology so that there is now no distinction between their digital and physical existences. There’s no question this has changed the shopper journey – thanks particularly to mobile, we can purchase pretty much anything, anywhere.

Yet brands and retailers still have a tendency to focus primarily on a linear path to purchase, designed to drive footfall in store. And in doing so, they’re bypassing the new sweet spot.

Defining this sweet spot, and demonstrating how brands and retailers can take advantage of it, were core themes at OgilvyAction London’s Retail Lab Day. According to Andrew Reeves, COO: “We created an immersive experience that engaged a wide-ranging audience on today’s constantly evolving shopping journey – one that encompasses all the touch points that today’s digitally liberated shopper uses to inform purchase choice.”

“The Retail Lab Day took people on a physical journey from within the home, out of home and in retail, showing how shoppers now use technology, and building insight around that use. OgilvyAction demonstrated that people continue to do many of the things they have always done, and that shopping decisions are still made on the twin criteria of relevance and need. Now though, they’re made through a much bigger array of channels.”

“For brands, the activation opportunities lie in having a relevant and credible presence in retail’s new ‘sweet spot’ – the convergent point created by the overlapping of shopper behavior, their use of technology and their environment,” says Reeves.

Technology providers included a line-up of out-of-home specialist, JC Decaux; Untap TV, creator of an audio/video embedded signal which can push interactions directly to viewers’ mobile devices, making any content interactive; Repudo, which creates GPS dropped digital content; OOH media agency KINETIC, 3D firm Inition, augmented reality specialist Holition, retail research agency Red Dot Square and digital signage companies Comqi and Stratacache.

In situ, their kit underlines how vital it is for brands to put technology into context.  “It is only by integrating behavioral, environmental and digital insights that we create executions that truly create purchase behavior. Retailers and brands need to be relevant and useful both to consumer behaviors, and to their environments, to truly hit the digital shopper sweet spot,” concludes Hugh Boyle, OgilvyAction’s Global Head of digital.

Behavioral economics champion Rory Sutherland added that marketers need to be aware of heuristics – a balance between the rational and emotional –  in order to deliver useful and relevant content.

Shopping may be dead, but there is a huge opportunity for it to reinvent itself providing brands are not afraid to embrace the post-digital era and manage to find the ‘sweet spot’ to activate their shoppers.

Chloe Giessner is the Head of Communications at OgilvyAction in London.

Follow on Twitter: @IciChloe

Traditionally, social media has always been considered a platform for engagement. If we look at the top social brands in the world and the gap between the proportion of investments made on creating engagement over driving – commerce, loyalty, service/utility is enormous

Hence, the approach we at OgilvyOne Mumbai took for ICICI Bank (India’s largest private sector bank) was the reverse from what a traditional social media brand would take. With nearly 45 million Facebook users in India, our strategy focused on value exchange, customer service & social banking.

To position itself as a bank, which provides superior value to its Facebook fans, ICICI Bank offers avenues to buy movie tickets/gifts/lifestyle products by tying up with online retailers to drive the usage of its credit & debit cards. Their recent offers on movie tickets created quite a stir by clocking over 1,000 tickets in sales making it the star product in the offers category. Unlike other banks and other financial institutes on Facebook in India, ICICI Bank took the lead in unlocking the full value of its fans.

Apart from online offers, content played a major role, the Education & Information series on Facebook gives fans knowledge on various products, services & smart banking to drive utility solely through content.

Customer service was definitely a bone of contention and has always been a talking point for service industries such as hospitality, banking, airlines etc. Responding to customer queries on banking, products & services through the Facebook page, the bank portrayed a customer friendly image and more importantly helped reduce a huge chunk service cost associated with customer service in the real world.

The convenience offered by online banking has overpowered the personal relationship that a bank teller used to have with the customers. In today’s hyper connected environment online/mobile & ATM have become a second home for banking activities. Customers are looking for a much enhanced user experience on the bank website and other online platforms in comparison to their physical branches.

With the increase in amount of time spent on social networking sites, ICICI Bank App on Facebook enabled the fans to check account details, get account statements, upgrade their debit card and perform many activities directly through the app. The app is helping customers migrate to a whole new way of banking in the digital age!

The overall social strategy has helped ICICI Bank to offer an enhanced banking experience to create a personal relationship with its Facebook fans hence mirroring the offline experience on a social platform.

The next challenge/opportunity for ICICI Bank on Facebook is to drive a robust CRM/Loyalty program, identifying the true loyalists/influencers on the page and rewarding them to further induce conversations and positive word-of-mouth. Secondly, the alignment of real world customer data with Facebook data is critical. This will ensure a seamless reward/loyalty system that drives full value of its customers.

But, there are hurdles that this program entails – a partial overhaul of mindset, processes, and technology. Being a large bank with many stakeholders in question, it requires patience and perseverance to get this through.

Overall, in a short span of four months ICICI Bank has demonstrated a whole new way of how banks and other financial institutes could approach social media and is all set to pave way to further innovations in this space.

Vednarayan Sirdeshpande is Planning Director, Strategy & Planning at Ogilvy in New York.
Follow on Twitter: @VedSirdeshpande

A new campaign from Ogilvy UK, currently running in Australia and Brazil, the Dove® Ad Makeover, passes the power of advertising to women by displacing negative ads with empowering, positive messages sent through a Facebook application, found at facebook.com/dove.

“Dove has always listened to women, and we are giving them a new way to be heard through this first-of-its-kind Facebook app,” said Fernando Machado for Dove. “We chose to use Facebook because of its power and reach in social media, which would propel these positive beauty messages to be seen by as many women as possible.”

App not yet available in the US

There are many challenges we as marketers face in today’s digital age, such as the constant evolution of technology, changes in the consumer landscape, social innovation, collaboration, environmental sustainability and transparency to name a few biggies. But what about the next generation of Ogilvy employees? How do we ensure that Ogilvy’s values of originality and pervasive creativity are carried forward into the time-conscious leaders of tomorrow? Generation Y are growing up in the information-intensive age where social media platforms are as every-day as the sun and the moon. They have a comfort level with new technologies that allows them to easily adapt to the accelerating level of innovation, which is redefining the workplace.

As our job roles and company structure change with consumer expectations and technological advances, so do the requirements of new talent. Generation Y’s technical ingenuity aside, they need to be multi-disciplined and be able to analyze data. Even with these skills, they will need to learn how to apply these new platforms commercially and as employers we need to ensure that we give them the best opportunity to get this work experience as early on as possible. Attracting the best of Gen Y is critical to the future of Ogilvy, and the Ogilvy Digital Labs in London have been looking into how we can nurture these future leaders. As an innovation hub, the Lab’s aim is to introduce its agency, clients and more recently students to new and emerging technologies. Ogilvy Labs has initiated a new model in partnership with educational establishments to help underpin their teaching by giving the students a hands-on experience called The Rough Diamond.

The Rough Diamond is a collaboration between educational disrupters and innovators in educational learning who have partnered to identify, develop and nurture new creative talent. The idea is to provide a new talent pool to fish in, across all creative industries including fashion/3D/broadcast/lighting/engineering ensuring that those we bring in are of a hunter and entrepreneurial mindset.

Below is a list of our partners and how they contribute to the model:

The Ideas Foundation works with secondary schools (14-18 year olds) in deprived areas to encourage a top-down approach to including creativity in the curriculum and harnessing young creative talent. Working with agencies they present real life briefs to the students.

The School of Communication Arts runs as a student agency (16-19+ years old) with a curriculum written by the industry it serves. There are no teachers; instead it has over 450 mentors from the creative industries who give their time for free to facilitate the learning.

Ravensbourne is a university sector college (16-19+ years old) that has established itself as a technological hub for creatives and businesses to collaborate under the same roof. Its programmes encourage collaboration across the programme content as well as across discipline.

Onedotzero_cascade is onedotzero’s education platform that aims to develop a new model for creative collaboration and innovation across diverse disciplines through a series of workshops and activities to foster personal and professional development.

The Marketing Academy runs a scholarship programme on the development of leadership skills for people who have been in the marketing or communications industry between 4 and 12 years.

How it works:

Ideas Foundation students interested in the communications industry are eligible for specific scholarships at the School of Communication Arts (SCA). Those interested in creativity and technology are introduced to the various programmes at Ravensbourne.  Both the SCA and Ravensbourne have collaborative relationships with agencies such as Ogilvy, who help to facilitate the learning through mentoring, running in-house training sessions and offering internships. Onedotzero_cascade run a series of workshops where students of the SCA and Ravensbourne (and eligible participants from the Ideas Foundation programme) are able to attend.

Through these existing relationships, Ogilvy Digital Labs have first pick of the emerging talent from these organizations. After 4 to 12 years of working within the industry, nominations for a creative scholarship at the Marketing Academy are then accepted for past students.

The next step calls for more employers to take ownership of skills in partnership with colleges and training providers. This creates an opportunity to take charge and develop training that meets business needs and ensures that the development of skills become an integral part of the business strategy. This requires a single market for skills-development (as opposed to public vs. private) where colleges respond to a genuine demand that delivers more economically valuable skills which businesses are prepared to pay for, is sustainable and helps alleviate the unemployment crisis.

Shannon Vaughan is the Enterprise Manager at Ogilvy & Mather UK.

@ShannonrVaughan

Silicon Roundabout, East London’s answer to California’s Silicon Valley, has received serious investment in recent years and a serious amount of press coverage, too. With the likes of Google set to host a 7-story space here this year, the Roundabout has become a hotbed of innovative, quirky and successful companies. So what’s the draw? For the majority of settlers it’s the chance to rub shoulders, and work with, a wealth of complementary businesses.

So many specialists in such a small space offered an opportunity too good to miss. With that in mind, we assembled a hit squad from OgilvyOne and the Digital Labs and hotfooted it round to the Roundabout to meet as many companies as was physically possible in just one day.

Our objective was twofold. Firstly, to see what we could learn from this successful, vibrant, and integrated business community and, secondly, to explore the potential for future partnerships. We spent the day engaging new friends in open conversation and the occasional heated debate. The experience proved invaluable.

What we took (from a vast array of companies with deeply different cultures and outlooks) were some brilliant ideas that could be integrated into our working lives with very little fuss.

Agile working with a war room mentality

When faced with a brief or business challenge, we discovered smart companies willingly forsook process to concentrate instead on getting the right minds in the right room at the right time. (Something, it seems, we typically reserve for pitches.)

Arguably, it’s an approach that could kill profit margins. However, with well-defined roles and goals, everyone knows implicitly what is required of them to keep the project/brief ticking over.

Another interesting point to note here is that several of those we spoke to saw it as a point of pride that no employee worked past 7pm.

More collaboration, more possibilities

With so many companies living in such tight proximity, there is a real sense of community at the Roundabout. It appears as though everyone knows everyone. It can be no surprise that if the experience is not available in-house to respond fully to a brief, companies look to their neighbours to fill the gap.

Too often we’re guilty of sitting in our silos. Collaborative working is not only healthy, but arguably essential, and we should actively seek to leverage our Shoreditch counterparts at any opportunity. Thankfully, it’s a practice we have already begun to preach.

Off the back of our day out, Nicole Yershon and Digital Labs, in association with It’s Nice That from the roundabout, have launched Rory Sutherland’s first publication Wiki Man.

Invest in possibility

Around 90% of the companies we spoke to invested heavily back in the future. Whether it was a percentage of revenue or dedicating time specifically for the generation of new ideas, there was a clear commitment to the future. And an open-mindedness too.

For instance, we are in the business of creating ideas but rarely do we cross the line to develop new products ourselves. There is less resistance to this notion in the Roundabout. If it’s a good enough idea, why not make it, too?

The whole experience has left my mind buzzing with new possibilities. Why couldn’t we evolve the Digital Labs to include hot-desk rental space for tech start-ups? One to ponder, perhaps.

Everyone we met was incredibly welcoming and keen to talk with us – not least because we are in business of creating big ideas, for big brands, and we do it well. The sentiment was truly reciprocated. It was a joy and a pleasure to meet such inspired and inspiring people at the Roundabout.

Let’s hope it’s the first of many encounters.

AJ Coyne is an Ogilvy Fellow at Ogilvy & Mather in London.

@just_coyne_it

I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the keynote panel at the “Search Engine Strategies” conference recently held in New York City. I was joined by Brenda Fiala, VP of Strategy at Blast Radius; Mark Huffman, Integrated Production Manager, Procter & Gamble and Giovanni Rodriguez, Digital and Social Strategy, Deloitte Consulting LLP. We were moderated by Dana Todd, SVP, Marketing and Business Development at Performics and our topic was the real meaning behind “Integrated Marketing.”

As a team we addressed these four questions:

• What does integrated marketing mean to you?

• What comes first, the big idea or the big data?

• How should Search inform the planning cycle?

• What are the challenges in truly integrated marketing?

It was fascinating for me to watch my fellow panelists, all drawing from a vast career of amazing experiences, find a wide range of ways to answer these questions. I’ll try to summarize a few of the quotes that stuck with me below.

Sometimes the best answers can simply be short and simple and to the point as Giovanni put it so well when he said, “Integrated marketing is the rise of the connected consumer. Marketing has become more strategic, in large part because of the access to data.” I was also a fan of the way Mark gave a very precise visual when he remarked what integrated marketing isn’t, “It’s not just ‘matching luggage’ – the same visual everywhere.” I like this statement because it cuts to the heart of what our panel was there to discuss. Integrating marketing teams should be about performance, driving the best return for our clients and looking at the entire ecosystem of marketing that is happening for a client to meet goals.

As we moved the discussion towards either the big idea or the big data driving integrated marketing, I found that the panel hit a perfect balance of pros and cons. Mark started the discussion with an anecdote about two creative staff members coming up with a big idea on the back of a cocktail napkin, no data input at all, just two great minds coming up with an idea that now drives a campaign for Febreeze air freshener.

I responded with a concept we here at Neo@Ogilvy like to call “of the moment data.” “Of the moment data” is simply the data points we find that are relevant to a client’s business and drive executionable insights for our clients, sometimes it’s as simple as a deep dive into the Google insights platform and sometimes we find rich first and third party data from our demand side platform buying that can help to drive a client’s goals. My point in bringing up this “of the moment” data is simply to say that while those two creative minds were working in a bar one night, they were drawing from years of audience insights, a deep rooted knowledge of their client’s business and a foundation of solid marketing expertise. Just because you’re not sitting in front of MRI looking at doublebase from 2009 doesn’t mean you can’t draw a data point or an audience insight into your big idea.

Brenda had one of the best lines on this topic in my opinion when she stated that you had to inspire both the analytics teams and the creative teams to get into a room together and bubble up the best ideas backed by the best insights, “popcorn logic” is how she put it. Another great visual of so many ideas bubbling up until the top two or three spilled over the edge into fruition.

I feel I have a unique approach to the question around search affecting the planning cycle. I spoke about how typically a search campaign is seen as the harvest of interest, our campaigns become the end result instead of the starting point. I challenged everyone in the room to flip that concept on its head by launching a new product, and launching a paid search campaign with 10-15 branded words for a product that has no awareness. Counter intuitive I know, you wouldn’t see much traffic, but it becomes a central piece of a campaign to watch how the interest surges in your product over time. It is a very tactical way to insert your search team into the strategy of planning an entire campaign.

On this point Brenda made a very important observation, come to the table early, as you start to engage with a new client, a new campaign or even a new planning team. Insert yourself into those meetings, make sure you have a seat when it comes to driving strategy, search is a major force behind performance in any campaign. At Neo I struggle with driving the performance for my clients on a daily basis, at our heart we are a performance marketing company, being in all conversations with key stakeholders from the very start is of tantamount importance.

Giovanni made an excellent point when we moved to our final topic regarding trends in our marketplace that are forcing integration. The convergence of tools and channels is driving this forced integration, he mentioned that social media folks have started to see every company as a media company, and I agree with him, every company has a story to tell and now has a vast toolset in which to tell that story. If you have a client who isn’t leveraging a social conversation, a video platform or even a search campaign, you have a client who is missing out on integrated marketing. Our integrated lives, and the technology upon which we rely so heavily in today’s world, is driving that integration. It may be painful but I think Giovanni is right and it will be for the best.

Lars Feely is the Group Search Director for Neo@Ogilvy in New York.

Click the following link to download via Slideshare or view the deck in the player below:

Why challenge a word that has become one of the most common terms in digital marketing? The reasons are plenty…

No word in the interactive marketing lexicon derails strategic thinking quite as effectively as “viral.” Everyone wants their video to go viral, but the fantasy of millions of people discovering a video for free (without media, PR and search strategies) leads to disappointment and disillusion.

Few videos ever go viral, and fewer actually need to. Good interactive video strategies don’t just rely upon massive numbers of views. From VSEO (video search engine optimization) to interactive engagement, video offers opportunities that go far beyond the limitations of viral TV2.0 strategies. Engagement and meaningful KPI’s increase the value of video to global companies as well as neighborhood cake shops – regardless of any viral impact. Optimizing your video strategy means pulling the levers that matter most… sometimes that is viral, but more often it is a whole different kind of planning.

The 5 Step Antiviral Program is designed to help marketers look past the hype of the viral world and take into account the many varied video strategies available to companies look to drive leads or demand.

1. Have A Plan

a)     Do you know your audience’s trigger events?

b)    Do you understand how – exactly – they use search?

2. Creative In Context

a)     Does this have to cost a million dollars (no).

b)    Can my cousin shoot it on his smart phone (no)

3. Optimize First

a)     How do you optimize a video? It is not like a webpage where you can do it after the fact, is it?

4. Distribute & Promote

a)     No video gets traffic just from being “good.”

b)    All videos need distribution and some level of promotion.

5. Measure What Matters

a)     The media tells us to worry about Volume Metrics (how many, how long…) but we know to focus on Business Metrics (leads, new customers, sales…) because that’s where the future profit is

Download the deck on Slideshare via the following link or view it in the player below.

What we think we know about digital consumer behavior tomorrow is already yesterday’s news, today. Today’s digital consumers are always evolving and living by a set of rules that they make. There is no longer a single framework to attract consumers. Instead, we need to develop a not-so-standard approach to engage our audiences. The Not-So-Standard Rules of Engagement with Today’s Tomorrow’s Yesterday’s Digital Consumers is a series of themes that gives brands the leading edge in digital engagement while co-evolving with consumers as the next round of app updates enters their queue.

The themes uncovered within the keynote will remain with us moving forward. It’s the ideas that change along the way. The takeaway? We need to be engaging our consumers and audiences with big ideas that inform technology and digital, not the other way around. Technology is only the enabler.

Download the deck on Slideshare via the following link or view the presentation in the player below.

About Brandon Berger, Ogilvy & Mather Chief Digital Officer Worldwide
Brandon is the Chief Digital Officer for Ogilvy & Mather, where he is responsible for leading the global digital resources across the network. In his role at Ogilvy, Brandon teams with the leaders of Ogilvy’s global digital practices, which span all the company’s operating companies. He is responsible both for offer development and for bringing the offer to clients. Outside of Ogilvy, Brandon serves as an advisor and board member to multiple venture funds, digital media and technology companies. He is also one of the founders of Boulder Digital Works.

About Consumer Engagement Technology World (CETW)
For 15 years, Customer Engagement Technology World (CETW), featuring KioskCom and The Digital Signage Show, has delivered strategic, marketing and technical business solutions for organizations focused on enhancing their customer engagement programs through digital media such as kiosks, digital signage, self-service, digital out-of-home/place based media, mobile technologies and other customer-facing technologies.