I arrived a day early for CTIA in Las Vegas, probably the most important event in the mobile calendar along with 3GSM and certainly the key on in the US.

Yesterday, was a pre-CTIA warm up with a Mobile Marketing conference. It had a very interesting mix of speakers, but to be honest, no one had much to say that I hadn’t heard or thought of in the last 5 years or so being involved and observing the space.

A few snippets of interest:

Everyone’s talking about mobile advertising. This is going to be a really hot space this year.

The constant refrain about mobile marketing is that “it’s like 1996 all over again” - at least among the people who were old enough to be around back then. I was thinking “it’s like 2000 all over again” as we were saying everything they were about mobile marketing about that time.

It’s pretty clear to me though that the US is about to go into overdrive and whizz past Europe on the mobile marketing front. It’s a great shame that we’ve had 5 years to get our act together and have spent it essentially faffing around. The Americans are going for it.

The same goes for Location Based Marketing by the way. Operators have been forced to deploy LBS by Government, to allow emergency services to find people in distress. This means that operators are keen to get a return on investment.

This is a stark contrast to Europe, where most operators have been slow to deploy and are convinced that LBS won’t work. Their evidence? That the first crappy “find my nearest” services weren’t successful, as I predicted at the time. But just because one service doesn’t work, doesn’t mean to say that none of them will.

It’s like concluding that if a man is covered in feathers and is killed when he jumps off a cliff, that all mans’ efforts to fly are doomed.

Interestingly, this doesn’t stop Microsoft putting a lot of emphasis on local search in their efforts to invade the mobile space.

To initiate a user dialogue, the most effective way is doing it face to face, followed by print advertising. Same as ZagMe 6 years ago.

CPM (Cost per thousand) for mobile advertising is around $15 - $30, which is absurdly high. Stand by the watch this plummet.

Oh delicious irony. A spokesperson for a record label claiming that operators didn’t understand the music business and how mobile related to it. While the record industry might be belatedly addressing the mobile channel, only 6 months ago, they were more Luddite that Mr Ludd himself.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that the record guys are finally embracing the channel. But kettles and pots sprang to mind.

Microsoft are getting serous about the mobile channel, selecting search as the Trojan Horse. They claim to be partnering with most of the operators in the US and Canada to launch their mobile search service - see mobile.live.com for a demo. Clearly a big driver of this will be (yes) mobile advertising and they are planning to share revenue with operators.

This clearly puts them head to head with Google, who are also using this strategy.

However, MS are still missing he bigger picture in my view (that mobile will replace the computer). And I have a feeling that mobile search might just be a bit of a red herring for the next 3 to 5 years.

Put simply, mobile isn’t like the internet, although like England and America, they’re superficially the same. But wander around a place like Las Vegas and watch middle America at play feeding the slots and boy, there are very fundamental differences.