MarketingProfs

MarketingVOX: With new media on the rise, companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to adapt their current brands to mobile phones and other interactive media, writes The New York Times (via MediaBuyerPlanner). Though personalization may be the key to generating a profit while distributing mobile phone content, companies will need to adapt to the wants of customers and to the prices they’re willing to pay.
“Most content providers get it,” said John R. Burbank, VP for marketing at Cingular Wireless, understanding the company’s need to create entertaining new content. “But the fact is, no one knows what ‘it’ is.
“One effort to create new forms of entertainment for people already inundated daily with media is being undertaken by Digital Chocolate, which is focusing exclusively on developing simple, unique and entertaining applications and games for mobile phones. This summer, Digital Chocolate will release The Hook-Up: Ava Flirting, a mobile phone application; users will pay $2.99 a month to create virtual images of themselves that interact with others in a virtual world.
The social connection between consumer and product is important to former Apple Computer employee Trip Hawkins, founder and chief executive of Digital Chocolate: “When you’re mobile, you’re the most socially needy and vulnerable and insecure, and that’s when the one platform you have is the mobile, wireless platform,” he says.