Situation
Archrival is a leading interactive / youth brand marketing agency with clients that include Lone Star beer, State Farm, Microsoft, Honda and Red Bull. The company’s focus is on highly creative campaigns that integrate online web, social, and offline elements into a connected brand experience. Archrival has been working with Pabst Brewing Company for a year, most recently on their “Lone Star Spirit” campaign. A key element of the campaign is to engage a consumer with a fun visual puzzle under the bottle cap, whose solution is available on their website. Since the campaign is highly relevant at point of consumption, the client asked for a mobile app to be developed as a fun way to deepen the engagement with the brand in a social setting.The Problem
Although highly experienced with web and social application development, Archrival had not had success with iPhone development. When Apple’s SDK was introduced in July 2008, the company tried over a period of several months to get a basic app up and running. Notes Bart Johnston, Director of Interactive, “I thought that my web development experience would have prepared me for developing on the iPhone, but it felt like I was starting completely from scratch. The learning curve was very high. It wasn’t just a new language with different syntax, it was all the frameworks, conventions, and patterns that you have to work with. I’m sure that, with a lot of time and effort, I could have become comfortable with it, but for Archrival it just didn’t make sense. For our small development team, we couldn’t justify the time required to learn a whole new set of skills that are completely unrelated to our core skillset.” Contracting out development was considered, but quickly dismissed. “We’re generally control freaks about our client work, and don’t like to outsource unless it absolutely necessary.” Cost concerns, the distraction of multiple platforms, and dependency on skills outside their organization led the team to decide in March that iPhone apps would not be possible for their clients without a solution that fit with their technical experience and was better aligned with their development team’s focus.Introducing Titanium
Johnston came across Titanium soon after the mobile beta was introduced in June. While waiting for the official approval for the project, Johnston experimented “an hour or two a night for about a week” with Titanium’s iPhone APIs. He read up on the documentation on codestrong.com, experimented with several Titanium examples like the Kitchen Sink application to get familiar with the APIs, and tinkered with Titanium Developer and its built-in simulator to get up to speed.Green light – GO!
Once the project commenced, Johnston was ready to go. He felt immediately at home with using his existing HTML, CSS, and Javascript skills to quickly build the app. A self-professed “webkit nerd”, Johnston was also thrilled to use sophisticated animation effects through Titanium’s support for HTML5. With cross-browser support issues, “HTML5 isn’t possible today in the web world.” Titanium’s support for native iPhone features like the local database storing the user’s exit state was “only confusing because it was so simple to code.” Design to fully working app took 50 hours, plus a few days for client review and testing. One person. “I started mid-July and was basically wrapped up by the end of the month.” Johnston found that the Titanium platform was well thought through, even on the non-development items that can unexpectedly take considerable time to work through. “My first experience provisioning a device in XCode, with its maze of certificates and profiles, took me several long evenings to figure out. With Titanium, I was testing on a device within about 30 minutes.”The future of Titanium in Archrival
“Now that we know this works, we have one more powerful tool for our clients.” With a lot of consumer brands now wanting a website, a Facebook presence, and a mobile app, Archrival can meet the full range of interactive needs of its clients. And with Titanium’s upcoming support for Facebook Connect, Johnston is thrilled at the prospects of merging all three brand experiences together. “This is exactly where we want to be with iPhone development.”
