There’s a very cool mobile marketing campaign featured on London Agency, We Love Mobile’s* blog. It’s a good example of a company blog that adds value to the blogosphere, without being all about them or being unduly sales-ey.

I also like Simon Andrews’ (Mindshare) blogBig Picture Advertising and Iain Tait’s (Poke) CrackUnit as other examples of an Agency 2.0 approach to engaging customers.

The original work referred to by the We Love Mobile peeps was by Saatchi and Saatchi in New Zealand and there’s a short video here that’s worth a look. But the basic idea is that users see an ad in the newspaper and bring it to life via an application on their mobile. In this case, the ad is for a Zoo and you can use your mobile to see images in 3D of some of the animals. As you move your phone around the page, you can take a tour around the virtual featured animal.

It’s a fun way of engaging readers of the newspaper and taking an ad to new levels of interaction. The downside is that it only works with Nokia phones (but hey, they’re substantially the brand leader) and it does require a download of a special app. And we all know that it’s hard to get people to download apps generally speaking. But then maybe because it’s not always clear in advance what the app does, so it could be as much a marketing issue, as a technology one. There’s plenty of companies having a lot of success with downloadable apps though and it’s normally because the function and benefit are pretty clear - such as free IM on your phone.

As regular readers of MobHappy will know, I think that using the mobile as a kind of digital mouse to bridge the real world with the digital world has a great deal of potential and this is a great example of it.

The good news is that as well as being fun and engaging, it increased zoo visits by 32%. So it worked as well!

* Full disclosure; some of them are old colleagues and I advise them from time to time.