I’m at the Mobile Marketing Association’s Mobile Marketing Forum in beautiful Barcelona for a couple of days, which includes Chairing a panel of Ad Agencies. This consisted of Chris Bourke of veteran UK agency, Aerodeon, Stefan Meyer Spickenagel of WPP’s GroupM and local Spanish agencies, Monica Deza of Universal McCann and Sixto Arias of MC Mobi.

Earlier on in the day Paul Goode of M:Metrics was giving his normal (is he stalking me or me him?) excellent analysis of the State of the Mobile Marketing Nation, backed up by some hard stats. It’s great to be reminded about what is actually happening, as opposed to what might be happening at some point in the future.

During Paul’s (too short) presentation, he asked for any agency buyers in the conference to put their hands up. To call the response “a handful” is probably overstating the situation – maybe 5 hands out of 200 or so delegates went up. To which Paul muttered slightly despairingly:

“So, we’re still talking to ourselves, then.”

Chairing the panel later, I took the opportunity to quiz the audience more. The same dispiriting number of brands attending. A scattering of operators. And the rest – the overwhelming majority – were some kind of technology companies jockeying for position in the value chain.

This led me to my first question to the panel:

“So Ladies and Gentlemen….where are your colleagues and when can we expect them to turn up for the mobile marketing party?”

It seems we still have a lot of work as an industry before we can get the mainstream agencies on board our bandwagon.

On the other hand, I don’t want to paint too depressing future for mobile marketing – far from the case actually. The conference was humming with energy, great ideas and interesting companies. Mobile operators are beginning to really wake up to the potential, though I fear it’s a smaller opportunity than perhaps they think. And even mega-huge companies like Acision (ex-Logica CMG), BT, Ericsson and CBS are taking an active interest - or even real action at last.

The first day was ably chaired by Mark Palmer of Maverick Planet and John Styers of Moblico. I had a chat with Mark over dinner later. He’s an ex-adman who nowadays works with people like Vodafone, Google and various agencies to help them achieve breakthrough ideas, as well as working to create more effective teams using personality profiling, especially for sales teams. If you’re in the market for this kind of thing, definitely worth a chat to him.