Brian Steinberg of the Boston Globe awards the Dunkin Donuts iPhone App as one of the areas ten most memorable ads in 2009.

#3: There’s A Glazed Chocolate Doughnut For That
What: To get closer to its customers, Dunkin’ Donuts issued a Dunkin’ Run iPhone app allowing people to tell their friends they were about to visit one of the doughnut and coffee emporiums, then take orders for food and beverages. Downloading the app, conceived by Dunkin’ with Boston’s Hill Holliday and digital specialist Studiocom, was free. Purchasing more caffeine and cake was not.

Why: In these days of digital outreach, every part of our daily lives is targetable by outside commercial interests. What could be more innocuous, more benign, than a coffee bun? Yet Dunkin’s digital tool turned that daily event into a business opportunity and set the chain up as the catalyst to bring groups of people together through this once-quotidian event.

More than 26,000 people downloaded the app, said a spokesman for Canton parent company Dunkin’ Brands.