mobiThinking was privy to a mouthwatering mobile application from Cobra beer. It’s a beer brewed in the Indian style for the European drinker, with a cutting-edge promotion to woo the upwardly-mobile drinker.

Due to some clever marketing and business acumen, Cobra has become the de facto complement to the curry (Britain’s most popular dish) in the UK, leap-frogging the sales of many established beer brands in the process.

Now Cobra is hitting the bars and is turning to mobile to help give it some visibility with revelers, with a campaign called iBanter.

Poke, the London agency that created iBanter, lured some up-and-coming comedians into a recording studio and filmed their lips as they tell jokes. Cobra has wrapped this up into an iPhone application for folks to download.

So now if you find yourself in a bar and the conversation dries up, you hold your iPhone – assuming you have one – to your lips and let it tell a joke for you.

Normally mobiThinking is pretty unconvinced by iPhone-only applications. They can be great, but they’re a bit niche and exclude the vast majority of people who don’t have an iPhone.

But this one really is made to share. So assuming iPhone users are sociable show-offs and don’t drink alone, it’s a good way to get your message out there. It also promotes up-and-coming comedians, which gives the campaign extra bonus points.

The branding is kept to a minimum with the occasional spinning bottle top or the sound of bottles being opened or clinking.

mobiThinking hopes we’ll be toasting the success of iBanter, so Cobra is encouraged to widen this and future campaigns to other platforms.

With all the hype, it’s sometime easy to forget that in many countries the iPhone is just one phone available on one network. We’d love to see some global data that compares the installed base of the iPhone to other handsets. Charts that focus on new handset sales, or gauge mobile Internet usage in page views rather than unique handsets, don’t really give us the big picture.

Bango does a top 20 chart of the handsets identified as unique visitors across all sites that use Bango’s analytical tools. Where do you think the iPhone came last month? Go on, guess... then look.

mobiThinking was introduced to iBanter at the Mobile Social Networking Forum

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