We published a piece late last year called “Why Online Marketers should care about Adobe AIR” If you aren’t familiar with Adobe AIR, it allows you to create or port web applications for use like a traditional computer desktop program, but with much of the interactivity and connectivity of the Web.
This past year has seen AIR’s popularity rise mostly in part because of apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. These apps, along with scores of others, allow you to plug in one or more of your social media accounts (usually Facebook and Twitter) and then track your social network’s status updates in one application, including posting out your own updates. With people having multiple accounts, hundreds of followers, and continuous updates, launching a bunch of websites to maintain your social existence can quickly become cumbersome. Having an application that sits on your desktop all day becomes an easy way to manage your social-self while still getting some semblance of work done.
Beyond facilitating social media, these apps have clearly gotten people more familiar with downloading and using applications other than a web browser to connect and interact. Further, while a mobile device is a different animal than a laptop, an argument could also be made that the wildly popular iPhone App Store has also made people comfortable downloading, installing and using apps over purely visiting websites.
Branded Desktop Apps (BDAs) have been around forever—remember Southwest Airlines’ “Ding!”? However, the new desktop revolution (read: Adobe AIR) creates more widespread opportunities for marketers. Ever since we began preaching the virtues of branded apps (check out myvisa.com for an example of one of our early efforts for Visa or their current Visa Signature Access Widget we also brought to life), we’ve always tried to hammer home the idea that desktop apps were one of the best ways to gain and maintain consumer mindshare. If a person downloads your application and uses it on a daily basis, what better medium could you possibly invest in than a branded app? What medium provides more consistent brand engagement? You own a piece of real-estate your target consumer looks at nearly every day: their computer.
We surmise the reason more marketers haven’t embraced the space is simply lack of familiarity and that apps are viewed as being “an I.T. thing.” It’s doesn’t necessarily fall into the white-hot social media realm or other common interactive plays like banners, microsites, or even mobile dabbling.
But some forward-thinking marketers who have realized desktop apps are not much different than building a website are thinking big. Last year we worked with the team at HARPO (Oprah.com) to launch the O Dream Board, an AIR creation (note: the HARPO team has since enhanced the application and it now integrates with Walgreens photo technology). Major brands like FedEx, Fox, ebay, and Nickelodeon have also launched AIR apps. Whether these innovations start with I.T., new product development or marketing departments isn’t clear to us in every example, but the point is they are consumer facing, and whether they provide content, entertainment, utility, or all of the above, they are a marketing communication tool.
We encourage our marketing friends to put down the 10th social media whitepaper they’ve read this month and start consider the desktop as an untapped frontier. If you want to check out some cool apps out there, take a look at the Adobe AIR Marketplace.
