The problem with building mobile apps is that it really is the wild west of technology right now. Much like web browsers in the 1990s everything is still platform-dependent. The usefulness and long term stability is also a problem in that no one knows if any mobile device manufacturer will drastically overhaul their systems in the future. Mobile device manufacturers are still in competition and so the notion of establishing a standard or convention is out of the question. If you go to Amazon and read the reviews you’ll discover that just about every book on iPhone development is replete with errors. Publishers themselves are in such a rush to capitalize on this boom town that they have foregone all proofreading and developers who have figured it out, like the prospectors of old, aren’t talking.

With the relationship of Adobe and Apple corporations existing somewhere between unpredictable and hostile no company should rely upon the availability of Adobe’s Packager for CS5 when considering the creation of an iPhone or iPad application. Apple desperately needs to make their Objective-C language acceptable to programmers, yet continues to have a hard time promoting it. Their only recourse has been to strong-arm the submission process. Several times within the last two years Apple has placed bans on Flash-generated IPAs (iPhone applications) then loosened those restrictions shortly thereafter. No one knows at any given point if a non-Objective-C application will be accepted by the App Store. In other words, the process of building an iPhone application is a big investment followed by a gamble. Developing mobile apps for Android or Blackberry is actually harder as they are still steeped in hardcore Java development, and so the progenitors of app development for those devices have built their libraries around Eclipse, which is probably the least intuitive IDE ever created.

Mobile App Relay

This is where (the now defunct) Dashcode and frameworks such as PhoneGap and Appcelerator have come in. With Appcelerator you write an application using JavaScript and a heavy understanding of the target mobile device’s API. The IDE then translates that JavaScript into either iPhone, iPad or Blackberry code. With PhoneGap you build a webpage or pages and launch them from a pre-built container. PhoneGap has produced containers for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile and a number of others. The PhoneGap route is obviously the better solution, however, updating such a container mobile app is still problematic for a number of digital media agencies and such.

And so I’ve created a mobile application relay service. My mobile app relay allows me to build web-based smartphone apps for my clients and provides me with the ability to more effectively deploy updates without going through the lengthy Apple submission process or recompiling. The only thing right now which is hard-coded are the app icons and splash screens… Although I believe I may be able to update those remotely as well.

Since my system relays requests through a web server the target files could be anywhere thereby allowing clients to host and ultimately take over their own apps. It is essentially an MVC way of looking at how apps get built, deployed and used; the app is the view, the relay service is the controller, and the hosting server is the model.

Got questions? Send me an email.

The internet’s age of discovery is coming to an end along with the notion of Google-as-phonebook. That behavior places the burden on the user. In 2007 Google and MSN stopped reading meta tag keywords and began reading right into the page content (Matt Cutts – Google Software Engineer). Since 2008 Google (the only search engine that matters) has allowed for custom algorithms (personalized search) for each user so that search results may vary from person to person based upon his or her previous searches. Google seems to be moving away from its search engine and focusing on outlets such as the new Google Catalogs – an app where the user is presented with predefined choices. Because SEO and SEM are about obtaining a better listing on the search engines, they put less value on what actually matters, on what actually results in a purchase decision, which is content. The “findability” of a facebook page or other social network presence is quickly surpassing index searching. The Google-owned YouTube is number 2 after Google itself when it comes to searching, according to ComScore. Not to mention half of all internet connections take place on a mobile device and mobile users typically perform only 1% of the searches which desktop users perform (Roger McNamee from Elevation Partners). They just don’t teach kids to type with their thumbs in school.

What I’m trying to say here is that people have changed how they use interactive and that they’re just not searching as much as they used to. Web users, and people in general, increasingly expect information to be delivered to them through whatever channels they normally use.

The internet has changed everything, including itself. The longterm objective of any digital advertising agency should be to pull rather than push, i.e. – to blog and tweet constantly and to establish “social currency” on the networks where decisions are increasingly being made, and finally, to build systems in which users don’t have to type anymore.

As a freelancer I avoid doing SEO and especially SEM for indecisive clients… those which cannot make up their minds who they are or how they want to position themselves. SEO is very problematic for old websites which have already been monitized around particular search terms. SEM can kill the client-agency relationship since clients never get the ROI they think they will. And so taking all of this into consideration isn’t it time for advertising agencies to forget the search engines?

No one has ever been able to measure influence. Forget your klout score, forget about collecting as many friends, tweeps and connections possible. That’s just falling into the old blast mentality of mass media which doesn’t work anymore. Real influence comes from one on one discourse. Businesses have always understood what great customer service can do for them. Transferring the dialog to Twitter or Facebook or some tucked away corporate blog just seems to escape them. (It’s the same thing folks, you’re just getting your staff off the phone.) When my clients tell me that they don’t have the personnel I tell them that unless they lock down their networks that chances are at least one of their customer support staff are already spending company time on one of the major social networks and directing that activity toward the good of the company could only benefit them. One more thing, and I’m not the first to point this out, is that when businesses participate in the discussion that it changes the behavior of the company more than the company’s customers. This is a strange new thing for companies… accepting that advertising has been turned on it’s head and that from now on it is about learning how to become a better company for their customers. Fin.

pulling together best practice recommendations from LISTRAK, Constant Contact and MailChimp. the goal being to come up with a thorough action plan for email campaings for use by digital marketing agencies and such. i’ll upload a zip when complete.

XCode being the IDE used on Apple Macintosh computers to develop iPhone / iPad applications.
I first came across Zinc in early 2008. Its pretty cool. Basically you start by building a Flash movie and you integrate this code into your ActionScript. The language is a bit like classic VB and it allows you to call upon OS functions. Furthermore, you don’t need to install anything since Zinc converts your movie to the native code of the OS.

In a digital advertising agency creative is an adjective and production is a noun… they are not departments. Web, or interactive, or digital, or whatever you wish to call it must be recognized for the department that it deserves to be.
It is no secret that traditional agencies are still following the old model of breaking everything into accounts, each headed by what is termed an account executive. A major problem arises from the fact that this organizational model for advertising agencies was built for old WYSIWYG media; print, radio and television (I guess for radio it would have been WYHIWYG). This model, as I’ve stated elsewhere, makes the assumption that each and every account executive is more or less equally capable of delivering quality web projects. This model also makes the assumption that there is even an underlying interest in the account executive to oversee such projects. In actuality, this model prohibits the agency from executing good web work.

I hate to do this to you but here is a pie chart describing the relationship between traditional media and digital media to an account within a traditional advertising/marketing agency. Since the trad agency still drops everything into the very nebulous bucket known as an account you can imagine which types of projects will get deprioritized every time. The type of projects which the respective account executives will slap together at the last minute. The projects for which no thought is put into. The projects, which when an organization is broken into accounts, are essentially a nuisance for the A.E. Finally, the projects for which the A.E. will skimp on when going over budget with one of the other projects which make up the account’s bread and butter.

This is a huge reason why freelance developers and small production houses can work circles around traditional advertising agencies with numerous people at their disposal when it comes to digital advertising. The model of the trad agency provides no overarching directorship (as it does every day with what it terms “creative” or “production”). There is no agency-wide quality assurance to their web/digital projects. The simplest of web projects inevitably result in the same learning curves having to be overcome with wheels constantly being reinvented. Code is never reused. Selling tactics can never be perfected. When broken into these little fiefdoms it should be no wonder why trad ad agencies simply can’t get their web departments off the ground.

Finally, and this is very important, when traditionally-trained account executives are forced to double as web managers there is a high probability that technology projects will be mismanaged and go over budget. Should the trad agency still measure success based upon accounts, i.e. – this account is up, that account is down, you’re doing good, you’re doing bad, there is the potential for the accounts to leak money in regards to their digital work and those money leaks could go unnoticed for years.

One of the conversations I had during my first week at a traditional advertising agency went something like this:

Account Executive: The client is asking about IP address, what do I say?
Me: What?
Account Executive: The client is asking about IP address, what do I say?
Me: Which IP address? What exactly was the question?
Account Executive: I don’t know! Something about IP address!
Me: [ *raising hands in disbelief* ]
Account Executive: Forget it! I’ll just tell her something!!!

For those who don’t know, every device on a network, such as a computer or printer, has an IP address. It is just a series of numbers used to identify one machine from another. All the files which make up a website sit on a computer somewhere. For instance, when you type kyledefranco.com into the address bar of your browser, behind the scenes your computer asks the computers at your internet service provider (which in turn ask these other computers known as domain name servers, but I won’t get into that here) for the address of the computer which holds the files for kyledefranco.com, and then sends the data which makes up this website to your browser.

I suspect the actual conversation between the client and the account executive went something like this:

Client: Our tech people say the new website is pointed to the correct IP address but when we try to view it from inside the office its not resolving.
Account Executive: IP address. Got it. I’ll have that fixed right away.

At which point the account executive wrote the words IP address on a sticky note and felt it was enough to have me put on the task. (Never mind web guys are not server administrators and never mind advertising agencies should not be debugging their client’s networks.)
This conversation would never take place at modern advertising agencies, which typically know the difference between building a promotional website and fixing a client’s internal I.T. problems. Nor would it take place at the “production houses” or “project shops” where clients go to get things done (excluding perhaps software companies). In a modern advertising agency or production house the clients are allowed to speak directly with the designers and developers. Project managers have a presence; namely to prevent scope creep. Conversely, in the few traditional agencies which are left all communication must go through the account executives, regardless of whether or not they have the ability to understand and effectively communicate the client’s question to those who can provide a result. In fact, for three and a half years in a traditional agency, much of my time was spent trying to answer vague questions, questions I knew had been “watered down” as they went from a client’s marketing manager to the agency’s account executive, and watching account executives reword those answers to make it sound like it was coming from his or her voice. Why is that? Wouldn’t it just be easier and produce better results to put the client, or better yet the client’s technical staff, in direct communication with the advertising agency’s technical staff? After years of wasted labor, screaming account executives, high blood pressure, and adult-onset diabetes (which comes from prolonged stress), I began reading about the history of advertising and found out why this happens.

Someone discovered long ago that when you sell something you’re not selling a product or service or idea but selling yourself. If you can speak with confidence a client will buy anything. One of the major organizational pillars, now a structural flaw of, the traditional advertising agency is that a large part of it is designed to pass off their account executives as omniscient beings. This was done, with all intention, in the 1950′s because it was believed (and proven to be true) that if a client is made to have confidence in an account executive that the client is more likely to entrust the agency with his money. However, this model is not sustainable today. Agencies are increasingly being asked to build complex systems which their account executives cannot talk about convincingly, much less oversee the development of. So the organizational structure of the traditional advertising agency, and especially the role of the account executive, is not conducive to getting quality technology work done. Account executives typically do not have the training, aptitude or interest in overseeing technology projects. I have yet to meet an A.E. who knows why they are doing the things they do; why they must reword an email to make it sound like it is coming from their voice; why they must fake expertise; why they cannot release control to the developers themselves. (Understandable since the org model is older than they are and part of the very mechanics of how trad agencies get things done, or I should say, used to get things done…) Unfortunately, from time to time, you will also encounter an A.E. in a trad agency who ends up forgetting the fact that there is a whole lot of smoke and mirrors goin’ on and who ends up believing in their own infallibility, thereby creating another problem endemic to trad agencies… ego. (But I’m not even going to touch that one right now.) The point I’m laboring to make is that selling a technology project does not constitute just the “buy in” but must be present throughout the duration of the project life cycle. The conveyor belt of old advertising is gone as quality web projects typically take months or even a year to produce. In order to keep a client on track a technology person must take the lead and must be the voice of the agency. Until traditional advertising agencies restructure, empower their designers and developers, deprioritize the roles of their account executives, they will be relegated to stick logo and tag line on pretty picture and send to printer as well as the chaos and broken promises to clients which comes from a frantic account executive holding a sticky note with the words “IP address” scribbled on it.