I admit it: I am becoming iPhone app-happy. I hadn’t intended to, but gradually—no, check that; actually pretty rapidly—I have become obsessed with mobile phone applications. iPhone apps were something that had been at the very periphery of my radar, but as I was researching my new WhatTheyThink primer report, Printing Goes Mobile? A Primer on Mobile Marketing, I began experimenting with them. Initially skeptical about the whole thing, I soon had to almost grudgingly admit: this is really very cool. Sure: some are short-lived (or downright vile) novelties (the fart generator, the bubble-wrap-popping app, etc.), and I have never liked video games very much. But there are some exceedingly useful apps that are changing the way that I—and others—interact with the world.

In fact, the other night, I was sitting in a bar with a friend and she was trying to identify the song that was playing in the background. In one of those “this could be the ad for this sort of thing” moments, I said, “I have an app for that.” You’ve probably heard of it; it’s called Shazam (there are others, too) and basically you hold your iPhone’s microphone up to the source of the song, it listens, analyzes, and tells you what the song is. It’s remarkably accurate, although ambient noise and distance from the sound source give it trouble.

This reminded me of a passage in the excellent new Nick Hornby novel, Juliet, Naked (which I highly recommend, by the way), where one of the characters is marveling over iTunes:

The first time Duncan had watched his computer fill in the track names of the CD he’d put into it, he simply didn’t believe it. It was if he were watching a magician who actually possessed magic powers: there was no point in looking for the explanation, for the trick, because there wasn’t one—or rather there wasn’t one that he’d ever understand.

...

Over the years, though, he had detected a niggling dissatisfaction with the track-naming part of this new sorcery. He couldn’t help imagining, when he inserted a CD into his laptop, that whoever was in cyberspace monitoring his musical tastes thought them dull, and a little too mainstream. You could never catch him out. Duncan imagined a twenty-first century Neil Armstrong wearing a helmet with built-in Bang and Olufsen headphones, floating around somewhere a lot like old-fashioned space (except it was even less comprehensible and clearly contained a lot more pornography), thinking, Oh, not another one of these. Give me something harder.

I also found an app targeted to runners that lets them use their iPhone to calculate their heart rate, blood pressure, etc. What you do is (I swear I am not making this up) hold the phone's microphone on a vein. Although, with my luck, I’d accidentally launch Shazam and be inundated with links to songs about the human circulatory system.

Anyway, that’s all a bit of fun, but apps are a mere fraction of what constitutes the larger universe of “mobile marketing,” which can include any or all of the following (but is by no means limited to them):

• Automated robocalls to mobile phones; not appreciably different from old-fashioned, and generally loathed, telemarketing. In some advanced applications, calls can be based on the phone’s physical proximity to a location. This is also a good way to ensure that someone’s mobile phone ends up at the bottom of the nearest river. 


• Promotional SMS text messages sent to a mobile phone. This has been more popular in Europe than in North America, and is not without its controversy—i.e., the extent to which it constitutes spam if conducted on a non-opt-in basis.


• Using other media (billboards, magazines, TV/radio spots, etc.) to drive users to send a text message to a marketer to interact with a brand in some fashion. This can take the form of a poll, a contest, etc. Often this pulls the user to opt-in to a subscription service that delivers SMS-based updates, news, etc.  


• MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) messages; rich media (photos, video, animation, etc.) sent to or from a user’s smartphone.


• Formatting ads specifically for the “mobile Web,” or Web pages optimized for access via mobile devices.


• Integration of social media and networking—Facebook, Twitter, etc.—with mobile media so that social media users can update their network wherever they are and whatever they are doing.


• Branded applications for smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, etc. For example, some banks now have an iPhone app that let customers do their banking via their phone.  More and more retailers—Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Pizza Hut—now have iPhone applications that facilitate finding locations, purchasing items, etc. 


• Location-based marketing by which content is delivered to a mobile phone based on its physical location. This content can either be delivered as some form of messaging, or integrated into the phone’s mapping application or other user-initiated software.


• Augmented reality (AR), in which pointing a mobile phone at digital “tags” embedded in physical locations produces additional relevant content, such as photos, video, audio, text, tweets, etc.

This being WhatTheyThink, I was looking at mobile marketing in the context of print and, specifically, how it affects the demand for graphic communications—which is, after all, what printers produce. In the introduction to the report, I illustrate this by using as a simple example a situation that I imagine most of us have been in at some point or another.

Say you are in a strange city—perhaps at a trade show—and you want to find a place to eat. Or even say you know the name of a restaurant, but don’t know where it is, or if they have space for your party. What do you do? 

Back, twenty years ago, we would in all likelihood consult the phone book (print). Some of us recall that cities used to have phone booths that had phone books bound into them, and people used to refer to them to look up numbers. In fact, there used to be testy TV commercials in which strident telephone operators chided people for calling directory assistance for numbers they could just as easily look up in the book. (It was a short-lived flirtation with shame-based advertising.) So we would open the phone book to the restaurant page, look for one that was near us (or look up the number of one we had in mind) and give them a call.

Back, ten years ago, we would be increasingly likely to eschew a printed phone book and simply do an Internet search from a desktop computer; those of us who covered trade shows used to lurk in press rooms equipped with scant Internet-enabled computers to file stories and take whatever advantage we could of rare Internet access. Some of us had laptop computers using dial-up Internet connections in hotel rooms—expensive and slo-o-o-o-w.

Back, five years ago, we would likely have a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop computer, which we could use in hotel lobbies, coffee shops, or other Wi-Fi hotspots that started popping up.

Today, we can use an iPhone application called AroundMe or, one that I like better, Yelp, that will find your physical location and automatically tell you what restaurants, bars, taxi services, shops, gas stations, etc., exist in your physical proximity.  

Tomorrow, we will likely be able to use our mobile phones to access invisible “annotations” left by other users in the landscape to find nearby attractions and get dynamic recommendations. This is called augmented reality and most new applications use the cell phone camera to provide overlaid data on top of the view of reality. I have been playing with two early examples of this: RobotVision (which searches for nearby locations and can overlay directions, user tweets, Flickr photos, etc., on top of the camera view) and the staggeringly lame BionicEye, which purports to tell you how far you are from the nearest Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. (Since there is at least one of these every quarter-mile in just about every geographic location on the planet, I question the necessity for such an app.)

Whilst there are many aspects to modern technology that seem downright faddish (oh, but I kid Twitter), it’s difficult to see that much of what is happening in the mobile communications space is temporary or likely to go out of fashion. While it is an extension of the Internet (which, by the way, was also decried as a fad in the mid-1990s), it also goes beyond simple Internet access and, like the Internet, is a culturally transformative technology. One only has to look at young people to see how they already use these technologies to interact with their environment; I have a three-year-old niece who is already far more proficient with iPhone apps than her middle-aged uncle.

Mobile communications are changing the way we interact with the world. As (or perhaps if) augmented reality takes off, it has the ability, in some implementations, to, as Barb Pellow wrote in an excellent WhatTheyThink story a few weeks ago, “make print the ultimate in interactive media.” Think about it; you aim a mobile phone at a tag printed in an ad, in a book, on a billboard, etc., and launch a video, audio, additional text, graphics, you name it. That’s pretty cool. Speaking of printers and apps: someone should develop an iPhone app that will locate the nearest commercial print shop. Not that we’re going to be submitting print jobs via mobile devices any time soon—but you never know.

It will be exciting to see where all this goes. Keeping up with it all will be quite the challenge. Then again, I’m sure there’s an app for that.