BLOG 05.24.13

Toward the end of a long, serious year of business for everyone, we thought we’d indulge in a discussion of Angry Birds, the bazillion-selling smartphone app. But the trouble with Angry Birds is that it’s so brilliant, it forces you to get serious.

So, some serious thoughts about Angry Birds:

 •    It’s spawned a retail wave. Dresses, a cookbook, snacks and gummies. Will a game-app developer ever get funding again without having to answer, “What are the retail opportunities here?”

•    It’s made a lot of money for a small Finnish developer, Rovio Mobile, and captured the imagination of millions. Consumer product retailers worldwide should be asking themselves, “Why couldn’t we find a good app shop to build us a goofy game that would get us a jillion logo impressions with people who are enjoying themselves at the same time?” The internet age has radically changed the paradigms of who is a publisher and what they can publish. Couldn’t major retailers, with their resources, get into this picture for both marketing and revenue purposes?

•    It’s stoked a lot of discussion about user experience. The piece “Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience” argues that we should spend less time analyzing digital experiences that don’t work and more time on those that do, like Angry Birds. So the author does, and it’s surprising, fascinating and valuable for retailers and others. Everyone in your business remotely involved in digital should ponder it. Then play Angry Birds.