Adobe released a video showcasing the new capabilities, available to watch at Adobe TV and embedded below. You will noticed they added tons of capabilities around content … such switching images, embedding video and rich content … but it’s all about content? What about gesture navigation? what about the experience? For how long will Adobe keep missing the experience aspect that makes Apple, Apple.

The new magazine experience in a tablet is not based on technical capabilities of the tablet, it’s all about providing a richer experience to the user… making it more natural, seamless, human per-se.

Adobe definitely in the right direction … there’s a huge market of publications trying to reinvent themselves and salvage their business, and the tablet is one of the elements that’s a must … Perhaps Adobe is thinking of all these usability issues, but they should really makes a point to let us know… can change orientation? instead of clicking, can you flick those images? can contextually zoom in? Drag and drop bookmarks?

It’s all about the details. Would really love to see Adobe understand it as their produce some of the best design and publishing software in the market … Adobe,  you’ve for the tools, content, lifecycle … once you add usability and experience to it, it could be a home-run.

Before answering what does it take to make a successful iPhone application we have to define what makes an application successful. Sapient always asks why are we building something, what are we trying to achieve, and how are we going to measure it; so starting from top down, what are the business objectives, the key performance indicators, and all metrics. iPhone applications usually serve one of two purposes: drive brand or drive revenue.

Objective: Drive brand
Applications that drive brand most likely are free since they have to target a broad reach. Objective is usually increase awareness, brand recall, or word of mouth, and is traditionally measured based on simple downloads, usage, and extended with how many share with friends, stickiness, and engagement levels. A good way to take it one step further is tie in social media monitoring and analyze share and velocity of voice, general sentiment, and overall impact of the application within social conversations.

Now that we understand how to measure it, what will the application do? Nowadays brands cannot push messages to the consumers, they have to provide value and we generally call it brand as an enabler. Applications that drive brand usually fall under one of two categories: be entertaining or be useful. Entertaining applications usually have a wider adoption, more downloads, but less engagement as users open it just a few times before they get bored. Useful applications have a smaller reach but higher engagement; less users will download the application, but they will use it much more than simple entertainment applications. However the key for both types is simplicity.

Objective: Drive Revenue
Revenue can be driven directly by the application, or indirectly but multi-channel tie-in with retail and stores. Indirect revenue usually aims to drive users to store fronts, partners, or provide reasons for the user to purchase products or services. Whereas direct revenue is generated by the application. Measurement towards these objectives are always dollars.

Direct revenue can be generated from advertising or downloads, and both have different strategies. Revenue from advertising is similar to brand-driven applications: it aims to reach as many users as possible by providing free entertaining or utilities, and collect revenue through 3rd party advertising. However, download revenue can be a little more complex as it involves pricing strategy.

The secret to maximize download revenue is pricing. The most popular paid applications are priced between $0.99 and $3.99, with predominant 99 cent applications. These applications are what we call the big-fast-sales. Most users download them and use them once or twice; they’re predominantly entertainment and provide small value to the consumer, but the mass download provides great initial revenue and then stops. The most grossing applications are actually priced between $4.99 and $9.99 at 44% and account for 44% of revenue. These applications are downloaded less, but used much more often as usually they do provide value.

Here’s a simple framework to determine your iPhone application strategy

• Set objectives – what is successful?
  • Drive Brand – Free
    • Entertaining
    • Useful
  • Generate Revenue
    • Direct Revenue
      • Business models
        • Free apps
        • big fast sales
        • sustained sales
      • Revenue Models
        • Thru ads
        • Thru downloads
          • Pricing Structure
            • Most popular $0.99 at 50% and 0.99-3.99
            • Most grossing $4.99-9.99 at 44%
    • Indirect Revenue
      • Cross / Multi-channel
      • Point of Sale

Conclusion
So what does it take to make a successful iPhone application? You need a strategy, know what you want, how to get there, and how to measure. Keep it simple, make it engaging, and provide means to share and pass-along.

The Autonomy Interwoven Social Media Analysis solution is a combination of the Autonomy Interwoven web content management system and Autonomy IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer). It is designed to provide organizations with the ability to understand and leverage the conversations happening in social networks to make some money.

The technology uses clustering, pattern matching techniques and probabilistic modeling to understand sentiment, and can present marketers with a richer and more contextual set of data than traditional keyword spotting tools may be able to, according to Autonomy.

Anthony Bettencourt, chief executive at Autonomy Interwoven, argued that marketers have not been able to keep pace with the rapid changes taking place in consumer behavior.

“Social networks, which are by nature dynamic and unstructured forms of information, do not fit neatly into traditional, database-driven analytics systems,” he said.

“Interwoven’s meaning-based marketing approach, which can derive meaning from human-friendly information, and empowers marketers to automatically act on those insights, will transform how organizations engage with customers in the years to come.”

Once marketers have determined the trends on which they can act, they can use Interwoven’s TeamSite and LiveSite web content management products to deliver dynamic, targeted and optimized content to cash in on these trends, the firm said.

The company’s Optimost tool can then be used to run multi-variable testing on any changes to the site, according to Autonomy.

The past year, although troubling and difficult for many people, has been a fascinating period in advertising. It has caused fundamental shifts in the balance of power between traditional and digital shops and, more important, changed the way that most savvy agencies approach marketing. Results are still king, but budgets are becoming more and more scrappy and if that wasn’t challenging enough, the client is standing behind you with a pitchfork just to make sure that you stay on form.

This new marketing climate has businesses and brand teams embracing blogs and open-source content-management system (CMS) platforms to drive their new sites. While this shift is being viewed as a reaction to tough economic times, using tools like Drupal, WordPress, Ping.fm, Twitter, Facebook Pages and others doesn’t have to mean you’re trying to take the cheap route. The fact is that these tools embrace open architectures that have a lot of work (particularly social media integration tools) already built into them.

Creating basic blogs, allowing comments and uploading photos is not some new and revolutionary idea. Brands should have been embracing these kinds of initiatives all along. I think the driving force behind this delay was the time it took for many companies to finally get the ear of their internal stakeholders and receive not only their social media “buy in” but also a genuine vote of confidence that this medium could be vital to their brand.

Now the stakeholders are enamored with social media and its ability to enable brand-focused conversations online. The issue is that they are looking to spark dialogue through destination sites and campaigns that have a very short shelf life (i.e. campaigns that allow their brand to stay relevant until the economy improves). What they should be doing is treating them as permanent sites through which they can build a community, provide thought leadership and encourage ongoing discussion.

Now the question is, if conversation is really the goal and low costs are the requirement, what are your next steps? I say you take the conversations to the communities where they’re happening. How do you do this? Dedicate a full-time person to engage people in the social-media space by discovering conversations through free tools. This approach will cost less than a typical agency site and I can guarantee you that it will generate more conversation.

Marketers should also be sure to put more emphasis on strategy behind these efforts, as this kind of upfront thinking — the kind not limited to creative executions — can save the business money and lay a clear road map for success. Clients are demanding results and are most likely seeking reductions in fees in places like account management and general oversight, places where they don’t perceive ROI.

As part of your social campaign, empower your clients to do more work in-house to maximize budgets while enabling them to be successful. This can be achieved by sharing links to free online tools or providing guides or knowledge-sharing tools to handle things like digital engagement. And seek out low-cost production facilities and don’t have your agency make online videos for $100,000 when teenagers around the world are making successful ones for free.

Even if your budgets aren’t being reduced, you should look at these kinds of solutions. Why? Because right now there’s someone trying to get a meeting with one of your clients and they’re going to underbid you. But if you can do your work more economically, you can produce more of it and help the client to be exponentially more successful. Inexpensive doesn’t have to mean less intelligent.

As featured on AdAge’s Digital Next Column.

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The following is an excerpt from a recent piece, titled “A CMO’s Dual Imperatives – Driving Organizational and Technological Change,” on the Propelling Brands blog.  Click here to read the full piece.

No member of the C-suite has a riskier or more-short-lived term than the chief marketing officer (CMO).  The average tenure of a CMO at the ‘100 most advertised’ US brands is 28.4 months, according to recruiting firm Spencer Stuart in a recent Advertising Age column by John Quelch.  In fact, as a marketer, few things are as much of a sure-fire, eventual career killer as being named CMO.

The challenges faced by the CMO are not unique to this position.  In fact, they speak to many of the fundamental strategic problems underlying marketing organizations and marketing science today and that are linked to a permanent shift in power from brand-company to customer and to a proliferation of communication channels and information sources.

For CMOs to succeed they must sit at the top of a newly-agile marketing organization – balancing constantly-changing priorities, being technologically savvy and delivering closed-loop insights into the impact of marketing programs – but too often, such an organization does not exist.  The imperative for the CMO, thus, is to drive change.

Driving effective change and achieving these goals requires a two-pronged attack – addressing both organizational and technological change.

Organizational change

Part one of this change is holistic and gets into issues of how marketing is organized and operates, how it defines its objectives and how it integrates with sales channels and the rest of the enterprise.

A CMO’s checklist for organizational change should address the following:

•    Customers must be moved to the center, not the periphery; brands must be re-invigorated in terms of aligning the company with its customers’ needs:  CMOs must be the voice inside the company that challenges the tradition of product-centric, supply-chain systems and that re-orients the company’s processes and systems around the customer.  CMOs also must re-position and re-invigorate their brands with a sense of customer purpose.

•    Revenue must become part of the marketing mission and the link between marketing and sales; brand must be re-framed as an asset:  CMOs must ensure not only that every marketer in their organization embraces their role in, and understands the risks related to, generating revenue; they must also be compensated to live up to this idea.  Where does brand building fit into this?  CMOs are often charged with being stewards of the corporate brand and/or the total brand portfolio.  But building the brand, per se, will not lead to revenues; instead, it will provide us with a critical asset that we must understand how best to leverage.

•    Best practices must BE practices:  CMOs must not only raise the bar for their organization’s marketing practices and but also make sure that this standard is pervasive.

•    Creative/abstract approaches and an analytical/concrete mindset must be guided to equilibrium:  CMOs must actively cultivate this equilibrium – ensuring their organization is driving fresh, new ideas while maintaining analytical accountability –  through hiring, training and cultural imperatives.

•    Marketing technology and marketing systems must be viewed as a strategic asset, rather than a ‘problem for IT’:  CMOs must be the champion of a technologically-savvy, data-centric marketing culture.

•    Marketing system ‘architecture’ must reinforce marketing sustainability and be designed with a longer-term perspective:  CMOs must focus their companies on investing in and building marketing organizations that do not sacrifice longer-term opportunity for short-term gain and that can scale delivery to customers in a repeatable and value-added way over time.

Technological change

Part two of this change is technology-focused and gets into a critical topic – the need for CMOs to make sure their marketing information systems are up to the task of dynamic, scalable and integrated marketing management.

A CMO’s checklist for driving technological change includes:

•    Breaking ground and leading the charge on enterprises’ build-out of customer-centric information systems:  The CMO must be the chief advocate for not only transforming his/her company into a more customer-centric organization but also for ensuring that enterprise systems mirror this objective, rather than hindering it or sacrificing it to short-term profitability.

•    Focusing the spotlight on strategic vs. tactical marketing technology:  CMOs must question their organizations’ existing marketing systems and push for investments that balance priorities and help achieve what I like to refer to as ‘holistic agility’ – i.e., effective and detail-oriented execution at the periphery that remains constantly guided and bounded by the strategic whole.  CMOs must also make sure their teams to not become bogged down in tactical, communication-channel specific technology or data.

•    Investing in an integrated marketing management platform:  CMOs must work to understand and champion investments in these systems.  Integrated marketing management platforms are critical to the success of their marketing organizations in responding to a dynamic customer environment; they are a key step toward becoming more customer-centric; and they are the critical link to ensuring real-time accountability of marketing.  Plus, “[i]t’s insurance for the CMO,” commented John Rotheray, a mobile software entrepreneur.  I might take it a step further:  An integrated marketing management framework is the strategic infrastructure a CMO requires to succeed.

•    Making sure business intelligence and predictive analytics are pervasive throughout marketing systems:  CMOs must be aware of and push for business intelligence and predictive analytics being a critical element of their marketing technology infrastructure.

•    Pushing for a balanced picture of both online and offline marketing activities:  CMOs must push for marketing technology infrastructure that balances the total picture and integrates both online and offline pictures of customer-brand interaction.

•    Integrating with other enterprise systems:  CMOs must lead the charge on this integration and remind their peers that the type of real-time insight they demand into marketing activities is not possible without total integration.

It is only by addressing the need for both organizational and technological change that CMOs can position themselves and their marketing organizations for success in a newly-challenging marketing environment.

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Adam Needles is an entrepreneurial marketing leader, who is passionate about two areas — brand strategy and technology innovation.  And he both researches and writes regularly on the intersection of the two.  You can read his regular posts on his Propelling Brands blog or via his Twitter stream @abneedles.  He is also the former head of marketing for technology-industry analysis firm The 451 Group (and knows what it means to be challenged as a CMO).

True loyalty – and the word of mouth buzz that comes with it – evolves naturally from the great experiences you have with a company over time.

Notably great experiences are punctuated by a moment of “wow”. Sometimes it’s when the product or service delights,  or maybe when it anticipates the needs of a particular niche or a large group of people, or my personal favorite, for no legitimate business reason, when it pleasantly surprises a person.

Many of you have initiatives using all of or most of these methods, and so do your competitors. You’re creating great ads hoping that consumers will connect with you. These ads are in banners, on search results, on branded micro-sites, in company blogs, and perhaps you have even created a page in Facebook or MySpace. These are all good things, but ultimately we’re still talking about the strategies that have effectively worked in advertising for the last 100 years with just more mediums in play.

Reaching Your Audience

For a long time, advertising was made by an agency and a client, and then presented to the consumers as a final message. But that dynamic has changed.  With the current state of digital, advertising is not a canned product to be presented to the consumer. It is a dialogue with message boards and blogs facilitating near-instant feedback from the client’s target market. This sounds like an amazing new opportunity for interacting with consumers, but there is a catch.

With word of mouth advertising, one person will tell a friend whether they like or dislike a product, and their discussion is localised.  In today’s digital age, this is no longer the case.  What a person says about a brand has started to appear in search results, and in many cases, they are getting higher search results than a brand’s own micro-sites and primary websites.  Indeed, a brand will post its adverts and viral ads on YouTube and other video sharing sites, where they are instantly commented on for everyone to see.  The result is that brands are not in control anymore.

However, there is an important lesson for brands to learn.  Traditional focus groups often do not offer the insights that reflect reality.  But the people commenting and interacting with a brand via social media are reality.  It is important to embrace them and the digital space

Brand Evolution