The New Year has arrived with all the resolutions we hope to tackle.

To keep you from renewing the same resolutions next year, we’ve pulled together some mobile tips & helps to make sure 2014 the year you succeed with your goals. Your smartphone could be your best mentor!

ADMIT IT, we’re all helplessly addicted to mobile games like Candy Crush, Dots and Temple Run. We struggle to put our phones down and concentrate on work- but that’s no fun.  Just one more try? It won’t take long. We reach out our hands and feel soothed to touch that gadget again. Boom. Another 20 minutes flies away.  People are vulnerable to games by nature. To attract players to join and keep them playing, gamification design usually provides an exciting and adventurous setting, some “goals” and “obstacles” to beat, and a world that connects the player to his or her character.  The players get a sense of accomplishment and tend to feel better about themselves from playing.[1]

Thanks to Steve Jobs, gaming has expanded its arena to our fingertips. Smartphones have rapidly become a powerful gaming platform due to its portability and technological features. The mobile application markets also open up a direct distribution channel for innovative designers to provide beautiful gaming apps in great quality. By 2015, mobile gaming revenue is estimated to reach $7.5 billion worldwide, tripling from $2.7 billion in 2012.[2]   There is no doubt consumers are turning to mobile games. Advertising within mobile games allows brands to develop their own forms of entertainment and drive engagement.

It is a whole new way to encourage consumers to interact with the brand and build a community.

Experienced with game developing in various industries, the Aurnhammer team has observed business success in branded mobile games. We came up with a white paper, “Business of Branded Mobile Games”, to put marketers at ease in regards to planning their gaming strategy.

New Yorkers are known for tackling fast-paced lifestyle without losing their elegance. They can be trapped in the ancient subway system as well as the bizarre fusion cuisines. Thanks to technology, city dwellers now can manage their world on-the-go with mighty smartphones and tablets. As a member of the Aurnhammer marketing team and an avid Android user, I want to share four of my favorite Android mobile apps that help me get on the Big Apple without missing a beat.

I use an Android phone because of its freedom of personalization, and its capability of linking my Google account to the entire device. Like most people, I spend a lot of my time browsing mindlessly on Facebook. But there are many other less frequently mentioned apps that have brought me eye-opening experience.

Mobile and education go hand in hand.

by Cooper Zhu
Aurnhammer Marketing Specialist

With consumer spending finally seeing a comeback post-recession; there seems to be an equal rebound in marketing spending. The global advertising market is expected to grow by 6 % in 2014. However this does not mean that all forms of advertising is expected to grow. In fact it is projected that TV Ad Revenues will drop around 3 percent – in part due to a lack of political elections or the Olympics. Despite being an off year for TV Advertising, for some reason this is still the most prestigious advertising platform.

Even though the advertising landscape is changing and adapting to new technologies, it is definitely lagging behind the times: mobile is just beginning to make a dent in the advertising world. With more and more Millennials coming of age, this will heavily affect the way companies interact with their customers. The trend has already been pushing towards a tailored shopping experience, where customers expect promotions, a social media presence and brand recognition.

As smartphones become more of a necessity rather than an accessory in everyday life, many top brands are beginning to notice mobile in the marketing landscape. Although digital advertising has become an important part of the conversation amongst marketer, mobile is the next frontier. The tech-community has experienced exponential advancements in mobile capabilities within the past year; however, this technology hasn’t caught on with most industries yet.

Digital, i.e. banner and video advertisements may seem like an easy solution to changes in the advertising world, but these forms of advertising lack interactive features and do not add much value to a brand or product. Mobile Apps however do not always fall flat, unlike digital ads.

Apps allow brands to cultivate new technologies and use them to enhance the consumer experience or even to offer new ways of consuming.

In this day and age, consumers are looking for authentic brands, what better way to build a strong and unique brand than through an App. People are more interested in the companies that can relate to us in new ways without trying too hard. It’s a subtle art to master, but mobile is definitely the next platform that has the potential to bridge the gap between corporate America and the consumer – allowing consumers to better communicate with companies and vice versa.

But it seems as though many companies are reluctant to adopt a mobile strategy. Digital is an “up and coming” player in the advertising world, rivaling TV Advertising whereas Mobile is more like the underground/dive bar option for marketers. This is simply because the return on investment (ROI) is not as easy to evaluate for apps. To help businesses calculate ROI of mobile apps, Aurnhammer provides some guidelines for measuring a mobile app’s success in its newly launched whitepaper “Budgeting for Mobile in 2014”, which can be accessed for free online.

Read more about the ROI of apps by checking out our “Budgeting for Mobile in 2014” White Paper.

Media has evolved to the point of gigantism. Banks in 2008 were too big to fail – now it’s the media that has gotten too big to ignore

by Cooper Zhu, Aurnhammer Social Media Specialist

The media is present in almost all walks of life. Media has invaded YouTube, Facebook, and even our personal lives; these sites were originally created for the people. Now these sites have handed over ownership to advertisers; this represents the new trend of “millennial free-bees.” Almost nothing is paid for on the web – music is essentially all pirated or can be listened to for free on advertiser-supported apps/sites such as Pandora, Spotify, and Songza. This new age of free everything has allowed people to absorb more information as it is happening. Never before could we have live streaming video of impending warfare as demonstrated by the most recent Israeli-Palestinian uproar. Now thanks to sophisticated mobile tools and social media – this powerful combination has allowed people to capture all walks of life in real time and share it with the rest of the world.

To me, this over-sharing can be a good and bad thing. First of all, this exponential growth in mobile innovations has allowed the media to grow along with it – allowing readers to constantly be bombarded with world and domestic news. What exactly is the media though and what has it become?

The word social-media is now a fairly common term; in fact it is usually a part of a company’s marketing strategy nowadays.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter allow the average American to share, and in many cases over share about their own lives with the purpose of generating superficial, “virtual likes.” In essence you post to create buzz – about yourself. Instagram especially has bred a generation of self-absorbed social media moguls who love selfies more than their MySpace counterparts and collect likes as if they were virtual social bargaining chips needed to elevate one’s social status. What does a like actually mean, that someone looked at your picture and thought you were hot? Or does it mean they would like you to like their own stuff? Or do they simply enjoy the aesthetics of the picture. This vague like, dampens the meaning “to like” something – in many ways to “like” something has come to mean you’ve simply acknowledged it. The interaction that comes out of a like is minimal and limited at best; it shows that a friend or even a distant friend has acknowledged your social media presence perhaps out of pity or obligation. These carefully tailored avatar-like alternate reality outlets that large corporations have helped to bolster and have branded as social media sites allow people to create a virtual life that is carefully curated. One’s Instagram life is way more glamorous than real life – you can add a filter or even “reinstagram” – where you instagram an instagram. This just adds to this sense of a false sense of self that people fall deeper and deeper into until their social media presence becomes their only way of communicating with the world.

However, all of this social media buzz isn’t all bad news. There is this trend towards the collective. This over-sharing has allowed for beautiful things to come out of it. Pandora is a result of the Music Genome project, stitching together peoples’ likes and dislikes creating a perfected and completely customized free radio. The Huffington Post is based on this sense of a community, guest bloggers and collaborators. Even shopping has transitioned to this sense of the collective, in pursuit of unique products people have turned to Etsy to find that perfect quirky gift or home accessory. This has led to revolutionary changes on how a company interacts with customers; attempting to create more personable interactions and relatable consumer experiences.