If a marketer is looking for a quick, easy to buy, one-off campaign that will produce results quickly and predictably — Branded Apps are to complex and not predictable enough to suit the advertisers needs ( although, apps can accomplish this, for the exception that proves the rule see: http://is.gd/e99j ).

If a marketer is looking for a new way to engage and connect with an audience in a cost effective manner, and is open to investing time to truly create something unique and be a part of the campaign long-term, branded apps may offer the perfect solution. Nothing in marketing history has ever empowered your audience to help you like an application can, and that makes it a very valid tool in the marketers toolkit.

There's no denying that Facebook has been a huge success on many fronts. Having said that, Facebook shouldn't serve as the benchmark for success for ALL branded applications as you seem to allude to. Believe it or not, branded applications have existed for a number of years prior to their appearance in Facebook. Desktop widgets, rich internet applications, and mobile applications all fall into the broad 'rich branded application' category which is now only starting to gain traction within the advertising community.

The bottom line is that most advertisers have yet to fully understand how to translate their offline advertising concepts into an online medium (in the form of rich branded applications). Until they do, there is going to be numerous failures (Facebook included) along the way. I've followed this (and Morrissey's) post up with my post “Branded Applications – Why Traditional Advertising Agencies Will Never Get Them” on my blog (http://blog.schematic.com.au/?p=93)

Matt Voerman (Adobe Systems)

While I agree that branded apps can be a tough sell, I do think there is room for the right kinds of apps. Look at Parking Wars from A&E which has over 300k monthly active users and is generally pointed to as being very successful. I think the key is that the app has to be able to stand on it's own and can't rely solely on the brand to drive users. Parking Wars does that through a fun and engaging game.

Also, while branded apps are generally more engaging than display ads, they're not the only way to drive user engagement. At Watercooler, we've had success driving user engagement by integrating advertisers into key pieces of the product such as trivia. This includes custom questions as well as helpful features like lifelines and hints. By making the brand relevant to users within the normal application experience, we're able to achieve a much higher level of engagement than with standard display ads. We have some case studies on our blogs if anyone is interested.

Bryan Bennett
Sr. Director of Marketing
Watercooler

(disclaimer: I do work for Conduit and this is something we see over and over with brands of all sizes)

Seriously, take the $30 million that Keith says Bud spent on bud.tv and that is just rediculous. Sounds like these firms are paying HUGE inflated consulting prices to their ad firms which are directly building these out, or contracting out to high priced outside firms.

Bud could have invested that money into 30 tech startups. These companies that think they really want to embrace online, social, etc need some strong in-house talent to lead these initiatives.

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Then we can debate the relative merits of branded apps versus embedded social advertising.

Thanks Keith for kicking off a great conversation.

Happy Holidays

-Seth

LOL!

Thanks, Keith