Viral iPhone application MouthOff pushes user generated mobile content

iPhone app MouthOff is a simple idea: your iPhone displays a full-screen, animated mouth that moves in time with what you are saying. When you hold it to your lips, the mic on your iPhone transforms your words into real-time animation on the screen. London-based design studio ustwo is pushing it’s MouthOff app as the latest viral craze. Whether or not that’s true, the marketing campaign ustwo is using is quite interesting.

ustwo is pushing MouthOff as a tool for creating User Generated Content. It encourages users to film themselves and their friends using the app, and post those videos to YouTube.

What we think?

The release from the studio uses REALLY sensationalist language, claiming that “it’s going to EXPLODE!” and that “everyone’s doing it, Perez Hilton, Elton John, Kate Moss…” which isn’t quite true. The celebrity endorsement is actually pictures of the celebrities in question with a MouthOff-running iPhone placed over the mouth – but the general message is the same. This is an app that is meant to be used between mates to create content for the net. Much like ThmbSavrs or iBanter, I can see this being the kind of app that gets used down the pub. Something as simple as seeing someone use an app like that can cause a device itself to be spread virally. Funny though it is to say, this fairly-pointless little app is often exactly the kind of thing that drives smartphone adoption.