Betting on Olympics Buzz to Push Mobile Commerce

Mobile commerce app Pounce has successfully teamed up with apparel stores Lord & Taylor and Hudson's Bay to promote mobile shopping via print-to-mobile tech. Hudson's Bay, the official apparel sponsor of the Canadian Olympic teams, is proudly advertising Pounce technology in print ads to encourage users to easily shop online for their patriotic apparel.

Pounce is a free app available to download for consumers. Print media, circulars, and ads by Lord & Taylor and Hudson's Bay feature a Pounce icon and instructions on how it works. These pages are activated on the backend so that users who open the app on the phone and scan the printed page can easily purchase the product on their tablet or smartphone. The item image is linked directly to a retailer’s inventory and pricing information, so that information can be updated directly through the retailer. Once a user has entered their billing and shipping information, shopping is an easy one-tap transaction.

To support the launch of this collaboration, the app is being featured in ads on bus stations and around Toronto for Hudson's Bay's Sochi 2014 Olympic apparel. The partnership includes special marketing integration, such as the call-to-action icons across ads as well as online campaigns. By using their huge Olympic marketing push to introduce the Pounce technology, the company is showing great confidence in the technology and the wide appeal to customers. 

Read more

Royal Bank of Canada launches NFC payments in the cloud

Royal Bank of Canada has introduced an NFC mobile payments service that stores customers' card details in the cloud. The new RBC Wallet is available to customers with a Samsung Galaxy S III or Samsung Galaxy S4 on the Bell Mobility network, with support for other devices coming this spring.

RBC Wallet users can use the service to make payments at any location in Canada equipped with a Visa PayWave or Interac Flash contactless point-of-sale terminal.

Read more

The Flappy Bird app's discontinuation gives iPhones that still have the app relic status

Flappy Bird is flapping its wings no more. The popular game for mobile devices was removed from online stores on Sunday by its Vietnamese creator, who said its fame "ruins my simple life".

Dong Nguyen, who created the game in just two to three days, was making as much as $50,000 (£30,482) a day from the game's advertising revenue.

In several Twitter posts, he said the game's removal was not due to legal issues and that he may make a sequel.

Read more

Mobile Marketer's Mobile Women to Watch 2014

Please click here to download Mobile Marketer's Mobile Women to Watch in 2014.

Mobile Marketer’s Mobile Women to Watch 2014 list honors smart women executives who are set to make a difference in mobile advertising, marketing, media and commerce in 2014.

Read more

App Downloads Nearly Doubled on Christmas Day

Three in 10 mobile device owners planned to download apps on December 25.

Mobile devices seem to be entrenched firmly into the holiday spirit: Not only does an increasing share of holiday shopping get transacted on mobile phones and tablets, including on Thanksgiving Day during what used to be designated “family time,” but holiday mobile use goes beyond the utilitarian. Christmas Day has become a major occasion for app downloads.

According to Flurry, downloads of apps tracked by the service were up 91% on Christmas Day compared with the average day during the first three weeks of December. And while this spike is large, it’s smaller than those that occurred in 2011 and 2012, when app downloads more than doubled on Christmas Day compared with a normal day.

Read more

Mobile Devices Will Be Biggest Business Security Threat in 2014

With more and more employees getting work done on the go, mobile devices are quickly becoming a huge security risk for companies, new research shows.

A study by the Ponemon Institute, a security research center, and Lumension, a provider of end-point management and security, revealed that 75% of IT security professionals said mobile devices will pose the biggest threat to companies' security in 2014, up from just 9% who said the same in 2010. Additionally, 68% of respondents said their mobile devices have been targeted by malware in the last 12 months.

Read more

Global Ad Trends: Mobile Takes Off, Internet Set to Surpass Print

After several false starts, mobile advertising has now truly taken off and is forecast to account for 37% of all growth in global ad expenditure this year, and 31% in 2014, according to a recent report by ZenithOptimedia.

Mobile advertising (defined in the report as internet ads delivered to smartphones and tablets, whatever their format) is still relatively small—with a total spend of $14.3 billion worldwide this year, or 2.8% of total ad expenditure.

However, it is growing extremely rapidly: 77% growth in 2013, followed by 56% in 2014 and 48% in 2015, ZenithOptimedia forecasts. By 2015, mobile ad spend is expected to total $33.1 billion and to account for 6% of total ad expenditure.

Read more

Mobile ad revenue climbs 15% during first-half 2013: IAB

While search continues to be the most profitable channel for marketers with a 7.4 percent increase in the first half of 2013, mobile is quickly establishing itself as the marketing medium of the future, according to findings from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Read more

Vine outshines Instagram for branded short-form video opportunities

Savvy marketers have latched onto mobile short-form video this year, showing a preference for Twitter’s Vine platform despite Facebook’s launch of Video on Instagram several months ago. However, as Instagram video continues to improve, its significantly larger user base could start to attract more brands.

Read more

Facebook’s share of digital advertising growing fast, thanks to mobile

Facebook will nearly triple its share of global mobile advertising in 2013 compared to 2012, according to research firm eMarketer. They forecast that Facebook will have about 15.8 percent of the total global ad market, ahead of Pandora, Twitter and others. Google, however, is still the big kahuna with 53.17 percent of the overall market, up from 2012. The overall mobile ad market is forecast at $16.65 billion — up 89 percent from 2012.

Read more