Mobile marketing agencies are tapping into a new line of business, according to the Chief Executive of one of the UKs leading mobile agencies. Its called, Digging the digital agency out of the brown stuff.
At a meeting with the agency boss in question, he told me his firm has recently been called in on no less than four occasions to finish an iPhone app that a digital agency had started creating for a brand client, and then found it was unable to complete. When I asked whether, in these situations, he questioned the logic of creating the app in the first place or just finished the job off, he told me honestly that it was the latter. Its all income, after all.
But he agreed with me about the obsession with iPhone apps that exists among brand marketers and digital agencies. Its an obsession thats driven by a couple of factors. One is the need to be seen to be doing something in mobile. The other is the desire to associate the brand with something as cool, iconic and sexy as the iPhone. So whatever the demographic of the brands target audience, an iPhone app is deemed to be the way to reach them. Even if the target audience is kids and teenagers, as evidenced by a presentation given by one of the worlds leading kids movie companies at a conference recently.
Later in the meeting, the agency boss walked me through the process of designing a mobile Internet site for a client, explaining the steps that are taken to ensure that the site will display appropriately on different handsets, from the iPhone at one end of the spectrum to low-end feature phones at the other.
He described this process as the agencys DNA; the reason why it is able to design great-looking apps and great-looking mobile sites, while some of the digital agencies fall at the first, or maybe the second hurdle.
I doubt very much whether any of the digital agencies his firm have dug out of a hole will acknowledge the firms contribution to the finished product. But an hour in his company convinced me that if I was a brand manager about to make my first move into mobile marketing, Id want to talk to someone like him, rather than a digital agency with an iPhone app to sell.

David Murphy
Editor