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Everything John SanGiovanni Learned About Branding Mobile Apps He Learned from Disney, Pluto and Ninja Turtles (“Well, Almost!”)

John SanGiovanni has a well-deserved reputation for being quite a “character” in the Mobile App world, and a few other worlds besides.

The unique journey John has taken has led from character auditions at Walt Disney World to classic Disney role plays, and from Program Manager and Technical Evangelist for Microsoft Research where he managed academic research funding for mobile technologies and user interfaces, to Co-Founder, Vice President, and Product Designer of Seattle’s Zumobi. Each role has been “characteristic” of something very special.

From a Mutant Teenage Ninja Turtle to a Mobile, Digital-Age, “App-within-an-App” Ninja Designer, John’s Disney “parade” has taken some “Matterhorn” twists and turns, but taught him some valuable lessons about “brand personality” that he was only too delighted to share with us.

John has authored or co-authored more than 12 patents in the areas of mobile advertising, hardware interfaces, and interaction techniques for next-generation mobile devices. These are not typically handed out in Studio Entertainment for the Walt Disney Company.

But truth be told, John’s passion for infusing nothing less than “Total Brand Integration” in a mobile app all started with Pluto (no, not the planet) at Disney. It was here that SanGiovanni learned to dance, to think and to behave like a beloved Disney character, dressed in the archetypal costume of “Pluto, the Disney Dog” to meet, greet and entertain his audience in the character’s one-of-a-kind persona.

In essence, John PERSONIFIED  the Pluto “user experience” with his body, mind, actions and attitude. “Walt Disney was fifty years ahead of his time,” the way SanGiovanni tells it. “Walt called it ‘Guest Experience.’ It’s what we use today in the app world!”

Today, Zumobi, which conjures up the mystical, cinematic board game by the like-sounding name of Jumanji, is perhaps the foremost mobile brand “behind-the-brands.” It is central to Zumobi that it target the right audience seamlessly without disrupting the usability experience in the mobile app at hand. Zumobi is transparent to end-users while serving up its co-publishing network and technology drivers from “behind the scenes.” The way it is unfolding, Zumobi is becoming famous for building not only the mobile app but “the apps within the app” to more effectively engage with the end-user.

Zumobi has been doing apps since the “beginning.” Two weeks after the iTunes App store opened they created the very first branded apps for the Beijing Olympics co-sponsored with Lenovo and Intel.

“Co-publishing” is itself, a novel approach where the life cycle of the project operates like a joint venture where Zumobi collaborates with a partner  media company.

Together, the two firms ideate, design, and execute an app, both being invested in the long term success of the outcome. “It changes the way that we think about ‘user experience’ and ‘user flow’ because we are very incentivized to make sure that both audience and app usage continue to grow, along with the monetization of the app,” says SanGiovanni.

The Zumobi  app development platform is anchored in an in-house tool known as ‘AppGen.’ It allows the development team, on a screen-by-screen basis, to decide what will run right on the metal in the carrier’s and handset’s native code, or if they want to leverage the broader HTML technologies, to apply to a wide range of devices.

The Zumobi Zeitgeist

Rich media today means everything or it can mean nothing. Brand advertising on mobile with top tier brands is a fundamentally different proposition than the sort of performance-oriented advertising that drives most ad banner buys. Zumobi believes in brand integration to its core. They want to infuse the app with a brand experience that is real.

In a recent “Chalk Talk” at the Seattle Interactive Conference, SanGiovanni discussed Zumobi’s approach to mobile and outlined Four Key Lessons that are crucial to success in the app publishing and advertising channels.

Lesson 1: The Guest Experience: We Should All Strive to Surprise, Delight, and Engage Our Guests. 

When SanGiovanni was becoming Pluto, the classic character at Disney World, he went through a rigorous interview process, learning intense choreography and characterization panels where judges made you improvise your characters’  personality. Then, if you made it past that gate, there was a huge orientation program. “This same “Guest Experience” is what we use today in the app world,” says John.

·  Banner advertising has been one of  mobile’s pioneering concepts, but this style is not going to “Surprise, Delight, or Engage” users. So, a philosophy has been created called Zumobi Brand Integration. It’s a technology platform and a way that we think about mobile advertising and truly work to enmesh the mobile experience with the brand.

·  Zumobi has  have been creating this style of campaign for three to four years. For Mercedes, the advertisement needed to be graceful if not elegant, not forced into the consumers’ faces. The treatment was done with very quick banners, only 4.3 seconds of the full add, and the banner then hides half way, so the user has a choice to click or not. A less invasive solution.

·      Another example is Zumobi’s JC Penny Parenting app which contains articles with links to other apps, and the option to click it or not. Yes, they are true “apps within an app.” They are actually served with a standard rich media ad sever so that Zumobi can change the campaign, the date that the campaign goes live, and they can track incredibly detailed metrics and usage data.

·      Zumobi is also able to pair advertisers with the app user audiences they seek to influence through brand ads. Say, for instance, that Boeing wants to get in front of “Meet the Press” app users. The ad pops-up inside of the app, and relates to the target audience.

Lesson 2: Attitude is Everything, They Can’t See your Face. They CAN See Your Expression.

Something else that SanGiovanni learned in the Disney process. Even under the mask, the guests can tell whether you’re into your role or not. During a try-out for The Ninja Turtles, SanGiovanni missed the fine print in the “Casting Call” poster requiring a Martial Arts Black Belt for the auditions. John stayed in the back, and realized that the people getting passed on from the choreography process weren’t very lethal. “I was overly enthusiastic, and succeeded in cracking all of the judges up even though I had terrible martial arts technique,” he recalls. “So I made it as a Turtle, I had a lot of fun. Your attitude is really important! ”

· John feels this lesson also relates to Mobile Startups, especially in advertising, because the specific brand of crazy  is endemic in an industry that’s moving and evolving this rapidly requires people that love the job and are passionate about it. Passion is very important and it is manifest in the emotion and love that goes into a website or an app. Users can sense this, and they know when the passion is missing.

Lesson 3: Pace Yourself.  This is an Endurance Game.

The “Parade Route” at Disney is actually an endurance game. New cast members would pass out if they didn’t know how to pace themselves.

·      An early seed of my work at Microsoft Research was a product called Launchtiles. We pivoted the company and produced apps with Pepsi, REI, XBOX, and a few others. We did one for Pepsi and Mountain Dew inside the XBOX app. It was the start of the “app-within-an-app” idea.

·     To relate back to the metaphor, mobile advertising takes work and time to truly prosper. It takes practice. Just like marching in a Disney Parade; it’s a journey. Mobile needs these new inventive ways to create a  more engaging form of advertisement, and Zumobi is here to do just that.”

Lesson 4: The Yin and the Yang. Hard-Style vs. Soft-Style.

“When I was a Ninja turtle we learned more about the softer styles verses the more aggressive ones. The technique I learned blurs the line between hard and soft sell, and that’s also what we’re doing with advertising. If you think of traditional banners, and are feeling overwhelmed, well, we see more opportunity in blurring the lines and thinking differently.”

·   “We see this in mobile, as we try blurring the lines and using branded content to compel our users. We can also re-launch an app within the app, so, we create another app out of the advertisement a user is exploring and save it on their iPhone.”

·     “We also created a panoramic experience that appeals to users’ interests,  and connects them with what they love, with organizations, with social networking sights, and with advertisers.”

·     “I think this is an incredibly exciting time for apps, for mobile, for advertising. I think that the fact that these types of experiences are starting to trickle their way into mobile devices represents a huge opportunity for everyone in this industry. Even though the last five years have been incredibly thrilling in the landscape of mobile, I honestly believe that the next five years promise to be even more exciting.” [24×7]

Seattle24x7 Correspondent Maddy Holup contributed to this report.