PaperBoy Mobile Ads – First Look Prototype

Posted on 28 July 2009 by Patrick FlanaganNo Comments

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Mobile display ads have come a long way in a short period of time. It wasn’t that long ago when all mobile ads were essentially really small .gif or .jpg images that had no functionality other than a click thru URL. With the iPhone continuing to increase its massive platform footprint, this is really accelerating and opening up some exciting new possibilities within the mobile display space.  So the PaperBoy team has been hard at work building out a mobile version that will be deployed within native iPhone applications.

Here is a link to the mobile PaperBoy prototype ad that the Pointroll team helped create (screen shot below) using CVS weekly ad content pulled in from ShopLocal.  Note that this demo sort-of works in a regular web browser, but it only fully works within Safari for iPhone which unlocks many of the features.

PaperBoy has gone mobile! By only using javascript & HTML (and NO flash), the team was able to create a version of a PaperBoy ad that is specifically designed to operate and make use of a number of iPhone specific features.

Here is what the offline in-store shopping list looks like populated with a few items of interest. This can be stored within the session storage that the mobile version of Safari provides for iPhone users.

So if you have an iPhone, try this ad out.  Open it up as it has been designed specifically to use the following iPhone features:

• Latitude / longitude based user location service that comes from either the iPhone’s GPS or cell tower proximity
• Slide finger controls that allows a user to scroll though products left and right via touching the screen
• Integration with the iPhone’s one click to call feature for the user’s current/closest store location
• Integration with the iPhone’s one click to bring up a Google map feature for the user’s current/closest store location
• Direct support by the underlying ShopLocal provided data backbone (eg SDAPI) to provide look up capabilities on both radians and decimal lat/long (geocode) values. So no more in-between step of hitting the Google maps API to convert lat/long pairs to ZIP codes
• Offline in-store shopping list where the user’s list of items of interest is accessible regardless the presence of an Internet connection. This only works via using some new functionality that is included within the latest web browsers as it evokes the data URI scheme (e.g., data:text/html;charset=utf-8;base64).  Click this link to actually check out for yourselves how this type of offline web page works.  This is a powerful new feature that will allow an entire web page essentially to be stored offline
• Support for some of the more traditional ways of navigating ShopLocal weekly ad content which include browse by categories, brands and keyword search

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