Smartphones get all the coverage, but about 82% of the mobile phones in use today are “feature phones.” They can connect to the Web with a data plan, but they can’t be customized with full-featured app downloads. Is there a way for brands to reach these mobile customers too with something more interactive than display ads?
One platform to do just that is Snac Media, a New York-based start-up that uses Java technology to let users of some 300 types of feature phones download lightweight software and create an iPhone-like tiled “dashboard.” They can then customize that with a selection of widgets that run in real time in the background on their phones, providing sports scores, stock quotes, and updates from both news sources and social media like Facebook and Twitter.
“We create an alternative home screen that the user can control and where they can place all their favorite stuff,” says Snac Media CEO and founder Mark Caron.
The platform is meant for brands that want frequent, almost-daily contact with the 250 million non-iPhone users in the U.S. Right now the apps are mostly from media brands — “we support the most frequently accessed content and the most used functions,” Caron says — but he hopes other consumer-facing brands will buy into this platform, which came out of beta late last year.
“The challenge of mobile is exposure,” Caron says. “The average free iPhone app loses 90% of its users after the first week. It’s an endless treadmill, as is trying to stay on the carrier deck.”
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