The Best Apps in Life are Free: Lego® Movie Maker & Olympic Body Match

Building an app? If you’re stuck for inspiration, take a few tips from these wee beauties.

ENTERTAINING: LEGO® SUPER HEROES MOVIE MAKER

For all those 7-year-olds (or 37-year-olds) who fancy themselves the next Spielberg, this app’s for you. (If not, you might prefer LEGO® Duplo Jams.)

Designed by agency Pereira & O’Dell, who worked with LEGO® to promote its DC Universe Super Heroes line, this little lovely gives you the chance to create your own stop motion animation. I won’t repeat what can be seen in:

• Mobile Marketer’s breakdown of the main features
• Review from CNET

But I will say that the Movie Maker app contains a couple of key takeaways:

1. Start With Your Best Tools: LEGO® has super heroes, you have _____. It doesn’t have to be physical – it could be the slickest weather radar mapping software in the country. Show off what you do best.
2. Hand Users the Con: Important point here. The more creative control you give to users, the more they’ll use it. And share it. And promote it. Be the LEGO® brick – they’ll build the rest.

INFORMATIVE: YOUR OLYMPIC ATHLETE BODY MATCH

Curious to see how you match up against the U.S. basketball team? Wondering how much a weightlifter really weighs? Check out Your Olympic Athlete Body Match on the BBC.

The right honorable British Broadcasting System has always done an excellent job on interactive features, taking wan statistics and pumping blood into them:

• Titanic: Faces of the Crew
• Have You Been Where the Queen’s Been?
• Crime Scene Forensics

The lessons to be learned here (apart from how ridiculously tall rowers look next to coxswains) are:

1. Mine Your Data: Your business holds the richest information deposits in the world. Customer habits, sales numbers, market behavior  – all of these contain intriguing and informative facts that future customers might like to know (your region’s most popular car model, the best time of the year to buy different types of fruit, what goes into your lab formulae). Don’t be afraid of statistics.
2. Think in Images & Icons: There’s a reason infographics trump spreadsheets – data is a helluva lot easier to digest in pictures. Take a leaf from the BBC and interactive websites and organize your info into a map or crime scene or a graph or any image that can be grasped in a micro-second. Show, don’t tell.

HIT A CREATIVE BLOCK?

Take a look at:

• TechRadar’s 60 Best Free iPhone Apps 2012
• Time’s 50 Best iPhone Apps 2012
• And my article on the Oh, Ranger! ParkFinder™ Mobile App

Or simply contact me to start throwing around ideas.

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Tagged: bbc interactive features, bbc olympic athlete body match, best apps, best iphone apps, free apps, interactive features, lego, lego apps, lego movie maker, lego super heroes movie maker, olympic body match, pereira & o'dell

Posted in: Game Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Online Marketing