According to Adweek, i-shop R/GA has officially announced the arrival of their mobile marketing division. Read the full article here.
From the article:
"Bob Greenberg, CEO of R/GA, said the mobile and emerging platforms practice would grow to be an integral part of the agency's offerings, on par with copyrighting and strategy.
"It's going to be very big," he said. "All of our clients are looking to do work in this area."
The R/GA mobile group will also include Webster Lewin, 45, who will lead mobile marketing for the group. Lewin comes to R/GA from WPP Group interactive shop VML, where he worked on wireless campaigns for clients like Burger King, Colgate-Palmolive and Microsoft. R/GA said it has also hired Claudia Bernett, 34, as an interaction designer for the mobile group. She previously worked at frog design."
Attention Ad people everywhere—did you catch that last hire? Claudia comes from Frog Design. A well-respected Design firm, not an Ad agency. I'll spell out for you what this most likely means. It means if you think R/GA will be looking at optimizing video spots for the small screen the same way the Ad agencies have pounced on YouTube as a an advertising distribution "channel", you are probably mistaken. Sure there may be the use of video—but if the Nike ID effort is a sign of things to come, you can probably expect designers such as Bernett to be working on mobile applications which extend meaningful brand experiences to the mobile customer.
