About six months ago, some of us here at Mobile IQ sat down and gave some serious thought to how the App market was developing.
We noticed that there was a ‘gold-rush’ mentality ensuing. And, while this was driving interest and building a somewhat tighter eco-system, it was not necessarily helping the mobile industry as a whole.
Why, you might ask? Apps are great!
Well, you could easily argue that the mobile industry has been defined by one word, “fragmentation”. As we saw it, the App channel added one more dimension to the fragmentation matrix – adding one more headache for content providers.
Unfortunately, we saw a stovepipe approach being employed for Application development. Specifically, an approach to Apps that was separate from the web strategy – separate even from how mobile-web is managed.
This non-unified approach was confusing to us. It was potentially also confusing for consumers, and ultimately bad for content brands with multiple channels to market, with nothing really tying them together.
Even before this was evident in App development, we saw this same issues unfold in iPhone WebApps (on the 1.x iPhone platform). Marketing teams were separately out-sourcing the iPhone browser experience – sometimes even bypassing both their own web and mobile groups!
Looking ahead, we could see that with the phenomenal success of the App Store and other App Stores being developed for other platforms, this whole thing could quickly get out of control.
We decided to propose a solution.
While we already offered one central location to store and deliver content and media assets for the mobile-web, we thought it made sense to unify the way Apps are built and the way they receive and report on dynamic content. The result would be a single system to manage the mobile channel.
This is what we think of as a consolidated approach to mobile, rather than the stovepipe system that was growing organically within the industry.
To fully deliver on this, we decided invest in an Application development team, that focused not just on the iPhone, but on all next generation App platforms (like Android and Blackberry too).
This was not as easy decision as you might think. That market is über-competitive and democratized with literally anyone – from large companies to garage start-ups – bidding for App development projects.
But those sources of competition apply the stovepipe principle, and often the quality of the end products is poor. And from our existing mobile-web customer base, we knew how important a centralized consolidated approach is, and why a poor product is bad for a brand.
So, we thought we’d take our message to market. It stuck a chord.
Within the first few months, our customers ‘got it’ and we won some really good business, initially on the iPhone platform. We already have a number of Apps live in a number of categories on the Apple App Store.
We’ve delivered lifestyle Apps with customers (including Dennis publishing) and have the #1 App in the ‘health’ category in the UK with the British Medical Journal.
So how does all of this apply to today’s BBC announcement?
A few months ago, we took our pragmatic, grown-up message to the BBC who had an open bidding process on their Application strategy. We came up against a smorgasbord of competition.
The BBC liked our approach.
Today the demonstration by the BBC at Mobile World Congress showed the progress on the first iPhone App we are producing with them. But like our strategy, their vision is much bigger.
The BBC wants (and has a mandate) to reach its viewers over a broad variety of platforms and in doing so, understands the additional fragmentation that will result in taking a shot-term view. Selecting Mobile IQ was not about mobile web, or the iPhone. It was about delivering on a well-rounded mobile strategy.
Over the next few weeks and months, we’re really excited to be helping deliver BBC content over new platforms.
Ultimately, we hope our approach helps many content providers develop sensible and cost effective ways to embrace the many mobile channels that now exist to reach audiences.
We hope this results in more accessible choices for viewers as we all continue to embrace the ever-evolving mobile channel.
