As MODE’s Interactive Director I’m constantly looking to extend our offerings beyond traditional web media into other channels such as desktop applications, interactive kiosks, and in the last year, mobile. At MODE, we look at mobile as another avenue that our clients’ brand can use to reach its target audience. Whether it is our higher education clients looking to gain access to a younger market nearly obsessed with the real-time access of mobile devices, our B2B clients looking for methods to communicate with business partners, or our consumer-based clients who simply want to get into the game to see what marketing opportunities are available.

The majority of these discussions recently have surrounded Apple’s insanely popular and trendy iPhone, which has sold over 10 million devices (including 8 here at MODE). The primary iPhone options for our clients are to design & develop a “web-optimized” solution or to create a fresh iPhone mobile application to be distributed via the iTunes Store or within an enterprise corporation. In the past few months we’ve done a little of both, but our designers and developers are particularly intrigued by the new challenges of creating iPhone apps, which for designers requires a brand new look at user interface real estate and for developers an environment and code framework that we rarely have needed in web-only solutions. We were even privileged to have Apple Senior Engineer Francis Shepherd stop by our studio for a few hours to discuss the iPhone and a series of other related topics based on his great experience in implementing Apple initiatives in a series of higher education institutions including Duke and Clemson. This got us thinking about the amazing opportunities that present themselves within our clients such as The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art or Arbor Networks. Duly inspired, we’re currently in production on few client iPhone apps that I’ll talk more about in coming months.

All this being said, the iPhone is by no means the only player in this market and mobile marketing is nothing new to the agency community. I’ve been amazed by the efforts of a number of power digital agencies who’ve been doing tremendous things in the mobile arena for a while now, including R/GA and AKQA who both formed their “mobile practices” in 2006 and Method who’s always inspirational in the brand experience category. Ironically R/GA and AKQA made huge splashes with web mobile connected initiatives for Nike including R/GA’s “Ballers Network” which is a mobile networking site (and extension to Facebook application) that enables members to organize pick-up basketball games; and AKQA’s “Nike PhotoID” which enables consumers the opportunity to create personalized footwear from the visual world around them. Just recently Method talked about their internal development project application for Google’s new mobile device the “G1“, which features Android, their open source mobile platform.

With these firms as inspiration, and what I’ve already seen from our team on this young platform I’m very excited about the possibilities for our clients and MODE.