Digital strategy specialists Apppli have noticed a trend among many of the marketing professionals coming ton them for app development services, something we’ve heard a number of speakers mention during Apps World Europe this week.

Apps are a relatively new and rapidly evolving marketing channel, and many businesses pursuing an app marketing agenda lack some of the critical knowledge required in order to build a comprehensive, effective strategy.

Apppli’s new ‘School of Apps’ course, designed and run by Programme Director Diana Marian, aims to provide businesses with a way to fill that knowledge gap. We managed to track Diana down at Apps World:

It’s day two of Apps World Europe. Yesterday we had a full agenda of industry insight, followed by relaxing evening of drinks and chitchat at the networking drinks.

Today we’ve a ton of industry discussion, apps insight and top-level advice to offer from some of the leading figures in the industry.  As ever, we’ve provided a quick list of brain-food links to get you into the swing of things while you wait for the action to kick off.

Track 1 is dedicated to TV Apps  and includes speakers from Virgin Media, Skinkers, Shazam Entertainment, Live Talkback and The Application Store. Here are a couple of articles you may find interesting.

Apps Tech News: Who’s set to benefit from TV apps?

techdigest: Samsung Smart TVs and the future of TV apps

Over in the marketing & monetisation at 1150 we have the mobile commerce session with representatives from LivingSocial, Net-A-Porter.com, DMA, Always on Message and Rightmove mobile discussing developments in mobile shopping.

Apps Tech News: 5 reasons why  you need to be ready for Mobile Payments

Apps World Blog: Monetising Mobile Apps with MACH

We hope you have a great second day of Apps World 2011, the hashtags for the event are #AppsWorld, and if you have any questions you want to direct to panellists, use #AppsWorldQ. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the show.

Banks need to move beyond simply offering the same services they’ve offered for years on the internet in order to really make mobile banking take off.

That was the message from today’s Mobile Payments and the Banking Sector panel debate this afternoon at Apps World Europe.

“Most banks have a mobile presence,” said Adam Levene, chief strategy officer for leading developer Grapple Mobile. “But it’s just a starting point, bringing existing services to mobile. Banks facilitate most of the processes in your life; so I don’t think they’ve really tapped that on mobile yet.”

Ed Hodges, head of mobile at UK banking giant RBS was upfront about the problem, admitting that his team were looking at a number of different areas of banking functionality, but were faced wioth the problem that it was unclear which were the most important for their customers.

“We’re bringing banking to the handset; you get to do your banking when you want, that’s nice,” he said. “But moving beyond that, we need to offer products and services that our customers need, when they need them. If people have got good ideas about what we need to do in mobile banking, we are all ears.”

In the UK it’s safe to say that the trend is less developed than in South Africa, where Yolande Van Wyk is CEO of Smart Services at First National Bank, and mobile banking has been in development for years due to the disparate geographical and cultural nature of the country.

In a land where there are more mobile phones than people, but only a minority of the population have a bank account, Van Wyk said banks are facing different challenges.

“The first opportunity is to understand what customers want and provide the most convenience possible” she said. “If you can save them time and money, then you’ll make money out of it.”

The challenge of service development in South Africa is different, where a lot of people don’t have bank accounts and the economy is largely cash based. “Now we’re getting this wave of mobile technology, $100 smartphones are becoming available,” she added. “To monetise that you need to be able to turn cash into e-money as quickly as possible.”

Another interesting insight came from Adam Levene, who claimed he’d noticed a good deal of innovation in this space coming from the retail sector. “Banks and operators are both traditionally very risk averse,” he said… see below where we caught up with him after the session:

The role of operators in mobile payment, a subject that has the power to make many operators sweat, provoked a debate around what in fact the operator has to offer to the mix, entertainingly chaired by Chris Book of Telefonica, Europe’s largest operator.

“Does the operator have any role to play,” he asked. “Is there any value add for us?”

Yes, said Ed Hodges. “You have a very deep level of understanding of the customer right from their handsets. We’re interested in understanding what you understand about the customer. There’s a path of analytical data that I’m definitely interested in.”

Van Wyk also admitted that relationships between banks and network operators are tough. “You have massive enterprises with very different objectives in mobile money,” she said. “And they don’t necessarily intersect.

“It’s a goat rodeo,” she added. “You’ve got everyone fighting it out until we work out where all the stake holders fit into this market.”

The panellists all agreed that collaboration was needed, and Hodges of RBS extended an olive branch on the issue, admitting that perhaps operators and banks weren’t talking to each other as much as they should. “There are problems,” he said. “But there are always ways around it, perhaps we haven’t taken enough time talking about it.”

We caught up with Chris Veenboer from Booking.com earlier today to hear about their developer rectruitment drive. We asked him what they’ve got on offer for talented developers, and what advice he had for people trying to break into the industry.

Here’s what he had to say:

How can my app benefit my brand and my business? A common question, and one we were looking at in detail this morning at Apps World Europe. A gaggle of experts were on the ‘Apps as Marketing Tools’ panel including Mike Anderson from the Chelsea App Factory, Oren Todoros CEO of Apps Marketing.Mobi, Ed Lea, CTO at Grapple Moblie and Bronwyn Martin from Imanao.

Here are eight key points from their session, brand marketers, take note:

• Analytics: You wouldn’t build a website without analytics, so why do it with an app? There are tools out there that you can build into an app from the start that will tell you who’s using it, when, and how. Going to a developer without any idea of who your audience might be or how they’d like to interact with you via an app puts you on the back foot immediately.
• Objective: Too many brands and businesses go to developers with very little idea of what they want to achieve. What is your objective in creating a branded app? If you’re just firing one out there because your competitors have one, you may as well not bother.
• Metrics: Many brands will measure the success of their app on download numbers alone. Unfortunately that measurement isn’t going to give you a true impression of how your app is benefitting your bottom line. It’s about backing the right metric for the right app; but ROI has always got to be near the top of your list.
• On-going: This measurement is an on-going process. Measure, test and refine.
• Innovate: If you’re not innovating, you’re missing a trick. Mobile offers the opportunity for businesses to be really disruptive, solving business problems in interesting ways.
• Who owns the app? In the past developers like Grapple and Chelsea Apps Factory would see CEOsd leading companies’ app projects. However, today, the projects are predominantly owned by marketing professionals. This is good on the whole as marketing is driven by analytics and measurement.
• Budgets are increasing: How much is an app? How much is a piece of string? It depends on what you want, but businesses are waking up to the fact that it is possible to generate ROI on a mobile app. This has led to app strategy being taken far more seriously in the board room, with increased budgets as a direct result.
• Beat the dreaded spike: Generally all apps will experience a spike in downloads followed by a tail off. Perhaps not releasing all of your awesome functionality ion one go, but providing regular updates that are tied in to marketing activity, could be one way to combat this.

Apps World exhibitors Credit Call specialise in processing transactions from all kinds of devices, parking meters, vending machines, kiosks; and now smartphones.

They are launching a new product that makes it easy for businesses like plumbers, personal trainers and anyone needing to take payments out in the field to do this using their smartphone, CardEase Mobile.

Initially available on Android and Blackberry, this is the first such mobile chip and pin system to be available in the UK, and offers added protection for merchants on top of mobile payment systems currently available on the market.

Peter Alcock – Marketing Director at Credit Call explains how it works:

With the festive season fast approaching, we’re gearing up for a bumper few months for mobile display advertising as ad budgets reflect the growing tendency of consumers to research products, compare prices and purchase Christmas gifts over their smartphones and tablets.

Record revenues were generated over mobile last year, and this year is set to smash this with brands spending more on mobile advertising than ever.  Planning for the busiest weeks in the mobile advertising calendar is already well under way and now is the time to ensure you’re ready and well placed to maximise the mobile advertising opportunity this holiday season.

Be prepared for peaks in traffic volumes throughout December and early January.  Last year across the Adfonic network we saw a 400% increase in traffic on the busiest day of December pre-Christmas.  If, as expected, we see a similar pattern this year, Sunday 11^th December is set to hit a pre-Christmas high, with traffic volumes for the full month peaking on 26^th December.

Advertisers

· Ensure you’re not caught out by sudden increases in traffic.  Think about setting daily caps and deploying day part targeting on your campaigns to ensure you don’t burn through your budgets faster than planned.

· Be ready with Christmas themed creatives in as many mobile ad units as possible to maximise the exposure of your campaign and get these live as soon as you can.

· Be clear in your ad creatives and within your mobile sites and apps about last order dates and shipping deadlines pre-Christmas.

· Ensure Christmas themed ads are replaced with January sales offers once Christmas Day arrives.

· The iPad 2 will undoubtedly be one of the most popular gifts this Christmas and iPad traffic will receive a large boost as a result.  Bear this in mind when planning your January sales campaigns.

Publishers and Developers

· Ensure you have as many ad formats as possible enabled in your apps and sites to ensure you’re set to benefit from the increase in advertiser campaigns over the coming weeks.

· And iOS & Android Developers….don’t forget to download our iOS & Android SDKs.  Designed to facilitate ease of integration and greater rich media and in app browsing capabilities, the SDKS feature a host of great benefits to help maximise your eCPMs.

With Apps World Europe opening tomorrow morning, we are now pleased to announce the launch of our #AppsWorld web app.

This useful application will give you plenty of information on Apps World, making your time at the event more exciting and easier to plan. It offers session schedules, a detailed floor plan, speaker profiles, exhibitor bios and much more.

You can access the app by loading http://www.event2mobile.com/appsworld2011eu/home.aspx onto your mobile device.

The app was developed by Web Spiders and its event2mobile framework. The platform helps to transform your mobile device into a portable event guidebook, giving you a hassle-free experience when attending events and conferences. For more information, you can find Web Spiders at stand 108 in Apps World Europe on 29-30 November 2011.

Adfonic’s very own Paul Childs presented to a packed hall at a seminar at Apps World North America. Paul provided independent analysis of the options available to developers and explored various options that developers need to consider when optimising performance and revenue.

Q: What monetisation options are there for developers? What are the key reasons for taking ads?

Developers have a number of monetisation options open to them. Taking mobile ads generates an additional revenue stream and provides developers with an alternate business model to paid apps. It also presents them with an opportunity of cross promotion. Ad funded apps also benefit from instant monetisation and revenue optimisation.

Q: How is display advertising spend developing?

The short answer? It’s increasing faster year on year. This year Marketer forecasts mobile display ad spend (banners and rich media) to be worth $376m. Next year in 2012 the forecast is a +64% growth YOY with a $594m spend and by 2014 it’s forecasted to increase +73%, $1207m. We are talking rapid growth here. It’s an exciting time.

Q: What options do developers have for generating ad revenue?

There are a number of ways developers can generate ad revenue. The first thing for a developer to decide is whether they want to control partners. If they do, then they have two options; using a mediation layer that’s customisable by the developer, or ad platform that can be configured easily. If a developer doesn’t want to control partners then they need to decide whether they want to control ads. If they don’t, then Yield Optimizers are the option.  If they do then an ad network, like Adfonic or others, would be the best solution.

Q: Are there many integration options for publishers?

There are a number of integration options. The key word here is flexibility.  Each publisher has their own needs and an ad network, like Adfonic, needs to provide options and flexibility. We offer the following options: SDK, Server API, RTB (Real Time Bidding), Sample code and Mediation layer integration points.

Q: In order to maximise revenue opportunities what should developers be doing?

To maximise revenue opportunities, developers need to think like advertisers. They need to keep up with agency advertiser requirements/trends in order to maximise revenue opportunities. Ultimately, maxmising revenue boils down to two things; Volume and CTR (Click Through Rate). Developers need to look at how they can improve their CTR e.g. amending the frequency or refreshing ads. Once the CTR has been improved it’s then time to look at increasing their ad volume.

Q: How is revenue determined?

There are a number of factors on which revenue is determined; CTR, price and volume. The table below shows an example of what a developer could earn given different volumes points and click through rates for average campaigns rates of $0.20 GROSS.

Q: How are brands promoting applications to consumers?

Brands are increasingly using integrated approaches for driving significantly high volume app downloads. More and more brands are integrating mobile into their digital marketing plans. One campaign that comes to mind is the X Factor app. They are using prime time TV to drive awareness of the application. They are able to see how all channels work together to create the halo effect. Although consumers may see traditional media options promoting the X Factor app, it does not compare with a banner on a phone that’s one click away from installation.

Q: How are developers promoting applications to consumers?

Developers are focusing their efforts and resources on mobile advertising. With the ability to track the cost per acquisition, developers are able to work across multiple ad networks to drive optimum cost per installation.

Q: Ok, so Adfonic is a mobile ad network. How can advertisers use Adfonic?

Advertisers can create/manage/monitor/optimise mobile display campaigns using Adfonic’s sophisticated campaign management tools. With access to a global audience of over 100 million mobile unique users, Advertisers can target by operator/platform/device/country/geo-location (UK, US & Canada) /time of day/demographic. On the creative side, we support the standard MMA and IAB ad units with campaign options including click to video, click to call, click to mobile web and click to app download.

Q. Are you able to give an example of some campaigns?

CPL Mobile Campaign Example

Peugeot do some really great CPL campaigns. The one that comes to mind is for their Peugeot 307. The goal was to generate test drive and brochure requests. The action was a one click to their mobile website where consumers can enter their details. Adfonic’s conversion tracking enables advertisers to optimise their CPL (Cost Per Lead).

Click to view Mobile Campaign Example

Warner Brothers executed a very successful awareness campaign for the film Yogi Bear. With one click to an in-app a 30 second video played. Metrics used for this campaign were average view times and the number of completed views.

Social Media Mobile Campaign Example

There are a number of ways to integrate mobile with social media. The goal for this campaign was to drive awareness of the film Hall Pass. A HTML 5 mobile site was used containing rich media and more information about the film. Consumers were encouraged to connect with Facebook and ‘Like’ Hall Pass, engaging friends and pushing updates.

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Adfonic will be back for this year’s Apps World Europe event and Paul is presenting again at this year’s event at 29 November 4.40pm on ‘how best to monetise and promote your apps.’ You can follow @adfonic  throughout the event and come visit them at stand 77! To register for your free exhibition pass please click here click here.