Nobody's Fools, The Times (Raconteur)

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

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From recipe tips to roosters on Web-cams, many branded ‘aps’ on mobile phones are designed by boutique digital agencies, like Stockholm, Amsterdam and New York City-based Perfect Fools. James Silver meets the firm’s CEO, Patrick Gardner.

Pecking away at a keyboard in his Broadway office in Manhattan’s Midtown, Patrick Gardner is downloading ‘live’ pictures of Claudio, a rather magnificent Mexican rooster.

“Those are his hens right there,” he explains, as the somewhat fuzzy images of poultry strutting and feeding appear on his laptop screen. “And Claudio’s the white one, hiding in the background.”

Claudio is not just any old rooster. As the star of an advertising campaign “celebrating the chilled out lifestyle of Mexico”, for the Mexican beer brand Pacifico, he’s a rooster with an entourage and, who knows, maybe even an agent.

A co-production between Perfect Fools and Seattle-based agency Creature, the iPhone-only application allows users to download a “Pacifico Alarm Clock” – featuring Claudio crowing - as well as a ‘live’ stream of his life, from a Web-cam feed trained on his coop in “a dusty backyard” in Cuernavaca, a resort town outside Mexico City.

“He lives in a cage, hosted by a Swedish non-farmer, who’s been feeling his way and blogging about his experiences,” says Gardner.

“The idea is that if you’re living the Pacifico lifestyle, it’s more relaxed so you can set him on your phone as your alarm clock and wake up to the sound of the rooster. By running this [campaign] on iPhone, which so many people are using nowadays, we’re reaching our target audience of young, early-adopters. The campaign has also shown up in an array of online blogs and sites, so the viral effect has been strong too.”

Perfect Fools, which launched in 2002, saw a similar impact with a recent mobile-platform campaign for gaming company Unibet, which ran during the French Open tennis tournament.

The interactive brand-building application enabled its audience to use their phones to place bets in ‘real time’, chat with others about what was happening on court and get all the latest tournament news. “In Europe it was the second most downloaded sports application during the period it was running,” he says. “And the format could be used over and over again for different sporting events.”

Over the past twelve months, Gardner says he has noted ever-growing interest from clients about running campaigns on mobile devices. “It’s getting to be a pre-requisite and brands are realising that it is a very cost-effective platform for reaching people,” he says.

In five years time mobile marketing will be “massive”, he adds, particularly when richer delivery ‘Flash’-style platforms arrive and smartphones allow opted-in users to receive location-based advertising – say, coupons for discounts in stores. “There are so many possibilities with these [devices],” he says, waving his own iPhone about. “We haven’t even begun to exploit the tip of the iceberg.”

(The Times Mobile Marketing supplement published by Raconteur, July 1st 2009)

Posted by James Silver - On Wednesday, July 01, 2009

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