Mobile phone marketing is really cool, but don’t freak out if you don’t have an angle on it yet. It’s in its talking head phase, no one’s done anything super awesome with it yet, and unless you’re actually selling mobile phones, you don’t absolutely need to do this. Yet.

All right. Think about the 1980s and their obsession with “special effects.” Started with Star Wars. Star Wars came out and every agency under the sun felt like they needed some crazy special effects. Next came the Genesis Effect in Star Trek 2, and everyone wanted to use a computer. Tron came out, and it got worse. This kept going right on through Kyle Cooper, RGA, the Matrix and Toy Story. Sometimes spots that used these technologies were dead on brilliant (Apple’s 1984 stands to this day as a masterful spot and you don’t even think about how special effects made this possible). But for every 1984 there was some agency making an incomprehensible jumble of special effects because they could. For me, the early HBO bumper comes to mind. Why again was that giant, silver metallic HBO flying over that computer-generated city? And what was WITH those horrible, animated clips that we had to sit through in movie theaters all through the 80s?

This is what interactive technology – and especially mobile – is like now.

There’s almost a state of panic out there, right now, involving mobile technology. In our 360-obsessed advertising climate, as soon as a new advertising medium bubbles up to our consciousness, it is hard to resist immediately delving in. It’s easy to feel like your client or your agency is missing the boat on some awesome new advertising opportunity.

To some extent this is true, but it’s important to keep in mind that without a logical application of your overall brand strategy, the whole point is moot.