As an interactive guy, I get asked a lot about mobile. It’s the future, in case you hadn’t heard, and it will replace the internet….by allowing us to access the internet… on a really really small screen… at slow speeds… future! So, interactive folk (as we prefer to be called, “those dudes over there who know about computers” works equally well) get to shape this awesome small screen, low speed future by building apps, and WAPs and maybe even Maps…later we’ll shoot some Craps…sorry I kinda got on a roll there…where was I? Oh yeah.

What this means, in all seriousness because I’ve reached my quota for ellipses already, is that we’re now building interactive experiences as advertising. To make it even simpler and more of a powerful statement, The Future of Advertising is Experiences.¹ Advertising in the TV era has been about creating an entertaining/informative/repetitive 30 seconds of TV to convince you to buy something for some reason. The only engagement we have with the audience is that they couldn’t find anything more interesting to do for 30 seconds but watch our spot. Now we’re actually interacting. This brings a whole new set of pitfalls

Now I know all of that wasn’t really news. We’ve been talking about it for a while now, but the news is the frequency that it’s becoming more of a mainstream channel. What this means is that the advise from the early days of the web, “You’d better have a website” has now turned into “You’d better have an app.” This is just as dangerous now as it was in 1995.

Back in the day, when the internet was ugly and blinky and limited to the stupid web safe pallet of colors, and dinosaurs roamed the earth listening to something called “cassette tapes” which replaces “records”, some business guru thought up this really catchy line: “You’d better have a website.” The problem was, no one knew what to do with their website. Most of them didn’t even know what it was. We ended up with ugly, blinky, web safe colored things that were essentially brochures. But on the web. Also they cost more than a brochure. Back then websites cost a lot more money to make, because you couldn’t buy a domain name for $7, find some high school kid (unless you found me or a few of my friends) to build you a site on the cheap and throw it on a host you paid $12/yr for. Bandwidth, storage space and domain names were not cheap until mid-dot com boom. But you HAD to have website. Because some successful business guy said so.

Flash forward to today. Mobile apps aren’t cheap to make, even if you choose just one mobile platform for you app. A lot of people don’t know what to do with them, but they know they want one. Because now “You’d better have an app.” The problem is that an app is an interactive experience. They’re a lot more memorable than a passive experience, like a TV spot or a web site. Which means that when you make a bad one and slap your logo on it, people are much more likely to remember you, but not for good reasons.

Branded applications need to do something useful (Yes, entertainment is useful if your app really is entertaining). They’re not just advertising, they’re a product themselves. Too many brands are just cramming website content into an app throwing it out there (some are even charging for this content, that you can get on their website for free.) That’s not useful. It’s not creative, and sooner or later it’s going to be broadly received by everyone as lame. As the iTunes app store begins to see more competition from the growing Android marketplace, the blackberry store, Palm and Nokia’s stores, etc we’re going to hit mobile application overload. Just like any other product, your branded apps are going to have to stand out by being useful, generating a lot of word or mouth recommendations, etc or they’re going to get a bad rep. Which means your brand is going to get a bad rep for something that’s not even your core business.

In the land of interactive experience as advertising, the consequences of doing something poorly are much higher. And like any big risk, this does come with a big reward: good experiences are remembered more. Apple’s advertising for the iPhone and it’s app store has done more than just sell their platform, they’ve set an important precedent with their slogan; we just need to make sure our client’s apps aren’t saying “Yes, me too!” but instead answer “Yes, there’s an app for that.”

¹ For now. Until something else comes along and replaces this future with an alternate 1985, where Biff owns a casino and killed your father to marry your mother.