ARCHIVES: This is legacy content from before Marketing Dive acquired Mobile Marketer in early 2017. Some information, such as publication dates, may not have migrated over. Check out the new Marketing Dive site for the latest marketing news.

Start Mobile connects digital, physical art via mobile coupons

Larger than Life Prints and Start Mobile have paired the digital and physical worlds of art to promote sales of physical big wall graphics via mobile coupons.

Larger than Life Prints launched a free iPhone application with more than 20 mobile art wallpapers by premier artists. When flipped, each wallpaper turns into a mobile coupon for a special discount code on real-life artwork from the featured artist.

"Our goal was always to bring new art to the world in new ways -- the delivery mechanism and how we monetize it doesn't really matter to me," said John Doffing, founder of Start Mobile, San Francisco.

"In this instance, we have simply decided to give away the bits and charge for the atoms," he said. "And even if this experiment ?fails' in a business sense, we still bring a whole bunch of new art to mobile consumers around the world."

This is the 19 mobile art application from Start Mobile, which claims to have found from its user data that free applications are much more attractive to consumers than paid ones.

For this reason, Start Mobile chose to promote physical pieces of art via free mobile art using mobile coupons.

The art within the Big Wall Graphics Mobile Art Gallery application from Larger than Life Prints was created by many big name artists of today such as Susan Kare, Justin Bua, Sugarluxe, Casey O'Connell, Vulcan, Matthew Porter, Samala, Felix LaFlamme, Luke Feldman, Apex, Martin Hsu, Moses, Christian Wiseman and Fat Rabbit Farm.

"Today, our artists' mobile wallpapers are distributed by mobile carriers globally, and mobile consumers around the world have purchased millions of ?art wallpapers' to personalize their screens," Mr. Doffing said.

"So the experiment seems to be working, and with the launch of the Big Wall Graphics iPhone gallery, we are just trying something a little bit different to bring more art to the world in new ways," he said.

"We didn't set out to be clever, but giving away digital artwork to sell more physical artwork looks like it is going to be a pretty good business model."

Start Mobile claims that its infrastructure allows it to distribute mobile art gallery applications to tens of millions of consumers for close to nothing.

Start Mobile also claims that this mobile coupon format transforms what was once a monetization tool into a marketing tool.

Previously, Start Mobile had introduced art gallery iPhone applications into the Apple App Store for $0.99.

Instead, the company is launching its Big Wall Graphics application for free as a marketing tool so that later, it can monetize the sale of physical work to consumers.

"There are billions of mobile phones currently in use globally, and today's state-of-the-art mobile devices possess more computational power than NASA had in 1969 when they put a man on the moon," Mr. Doffing said.

"This is not just a communications revolution, but potentially a creative revolution as well," he said.