A Razorfish executive said that mobile is the best medium to get a brand noticed and achieve specific marketing goals during the holiday season.

Mobile calls-to-action featuring an SMS keyword and short code or mobile bar code can make holiday-themed traditional media actionable. Savvy retailers can get the word out about holiday sales via SMS, the mobile Web and branded applications, while brands can use various forms of mobile advertising to achieve their holiday-specific goals.

In the fourth of a series focused on mobile marketing during the holidays, Mobile Marketer?s Dan Butcher interviewed Paul Gelb, director and mobile practice lead at Razorfish, New York. Here is what he had to say:

With so much noise and holiday-themed advertising starting around Thanksgiving and even before, how can a brand use the mobile medium to get noticed during this period of very competitive media?
There are numerous ways mobile?more than any other channel?can really get a brand noticed.

The first thing we?re seeing with our clients this year is that we?re thinking about mobile and the holidays during back-to-school, driving downloads of branded mobile applications as a set-up to transition to the holidays, so the consumers have downloaded the app and the connection point has already started with a significant audience

When it comes to downloads of our branded applications, we take a multipronged approach, which is not necessarily media-oriented, such as having a branded app that is inherently valuable to the user.

The features, functionality and content of the app is key to driving downloads.

When creating an app, consumer insight is important, keeping in mind the sbusiness objective or value you want to communicate to users and finding how mobile can uniquely address that need so they keep it on their dashboard and won?t delete it.

Mobile is integrated and coordinated at every level with what we?re doing with social media, building up Twitter followers, Facebook fans and YouTube subscribers?building out those communities with consumers. It then becomes a promotion channel with a solid base of advocates to leverage word of mouth to promote the app and get into a top app position.

The third area is acquisition media campaigns, where measurement is key?being able to accurately attribute actual downloads to campaigns has slowed this type of media.

We do some of that [performance-based mobile advertising] and also integrate information about the app and promotion of the app across other media?TV, print, email and other marketing components.

Another way we have seen brands capture attention during the holidays is to create in-store experiences that integrate mobile.

We?re seeing more and more that people are willing to pay more and go out of their way to shop based on experiences, which are more valuable at times than even the products themselves.

Everyone is increasingly time-constrained?time is the most valuable thing they have, so any way they can save time is important, especially around the holidays when the time crunch is even more intense.

Mobile has normally only one ad on a page, whether it is an app or a site, so it focuses more attention than other mediums where there is a lot of clutter.

Especially for publishers that are looking to maximize revenue during the holidays, on mobile you have more exclusivity and attention-capture due to the lack of ad clutter in mobile media.

What are some best practices for targeting specific demographics using mobile during the holiday season?
A best practice is to not start and stop and limit yourself to targeting just demographics, because understanding and targeting behavioral patterns is significantly more important, so you?re delivering the right message at the right time to the user.

Target based on location at office buildings between 4 and 5 using WiFi, offering them a promotion on their way home as they leave work to go shopping for the holidays.

Add on a location or time when the ad is served to drive a message that will lead to a sale, not relying solely on your market segment.

Which sectors/verticals are most important during the holidays, and which sectors/verticals match up best with which demographics?
Entertainment and retail without a doubt are large spenders during the holidays across all channels?it?s a huge time for retail and entertainment.

Retailers make most of their revenue during the holidays and get into the black around that time.

As for entertainment, there is a significant film push during the holiday season.

Also look to CPG with all of the entertaining and family meals, cooking and recipes and the need to leverage CPG brands as a part of entertaining and feeding a large number of people. It?s an area where those brands want to win.

As part of the shopping push during holiday season, we are seeing more and more luxury brands getting involved in mobile as well as social, where they may have been a bit slower to adopt it than other retailers.

Now luxury goods manufacturers that are not engaged in mobile marketing are the exception rather than the rule.

Given that many people are traveling and away from the TV and their PCs during the holidays, and the fact that people need to do more in less time, how can mobile address these types of general advertising challenges?
Given the travel behavior of consumers during the holidays, mobile is an extremely valuable medium for consumers, given that they may not be in front o their TV or interacting with traditional media, but they always have their mobile phone with them.

When the WiFi-only iPad first launched, we found 80 percent of ad impressions in hotels and airports, when on-the-go consumers are more likely than ever to interact with mobile media.

Why is mobile advertising significant/necessary for marketers during the holiday season?
We really live in a time of attention scarcity and time scarcity, and that is only amplified during the holidays.

Mobile, as the most functional device, can really provide incredibly valuable experiences, save consumers time and provide an incredibly favorable brand impression for those who leverage mobile marketing tools effectively.

It offers the ability to capture and pull people?s attention in via mobile media.

Whether it is rich media, apps or bar code scanning, mobile provides an interactivity and lack of clutter than can really capture attention at a time when consumers are so bombarded with marketing messages that they are trained to tune them out.

Brands can use mobile to proactively encourage them to tune back in.

In 2008 during the holiday time, there was no viable data on mobile?s impact on shopping and sales, but in 2009, we saw an explosion of data and information about how consumers are really integrating mobile into their holiday shopping patterns.

It will be extremely interesting to see that trend continue this year.