I was at the Mobile Marketing Association’s Forum in London this week, among other things, and it’s been hard to find time for blogging. But it was a great event, with lots of interesting presentations and I really recommend that you attend one in the future, if this is an area you’re interested in. Essentially, if your company earns advertising revenues or you rely on mobile advertising (and marketing) to sell your products, you’d learn a lot and anyway, you should be a member of the MMA.
I’ll try and give you a general impression and then write up a few presentations that struck me at the time. If I don’t get to write about a specific presentation it might have been because I missed it (sorry, but I still have meetings to attend and deals to do) or just don’t have time to write about every single one.
About 140 people attended, ranging from journalists and analysts, through vendors of mobile products to brands and agencies - pretty much the whole value chain. Google even turned up in the form of Christian Hernandez Gallardo, Head of Strategic Partnerships, which shows that mobile marketing is finally growing up. What’s more as Bena Roberts at GoMoNews wrote “But I nearly just had a heart attack as I have finally seen a Google presentation that is (wait for it) GOOD”. And it was indeed. Actually, it was the first one I’d seen that was both informative and didn’t patronise the audience to death as in “Hi, I’m from Google” (pause for grin) “and we do search!” Well done Christian - hope to see lots more from you.
The slightly disappointing thing for me was a lack of brands and agencies generally. And the ones that did turn up normally did so to do a speaking slot and then left pretty soon afterwards, complete with the prejudices they came with. If they’d hung around, listened to other speakers and done some networking, they may have learned a bit more.
A typical examples of a prejudice might be that “mobile advertising is still very niche”. Errr, AdMob has over 6 million pages available per day in the UK alone. And that’s meant to be too niche? It’s a major medium!
Someone from an agency who does really get it though, is Simon Andrews of Mindshare, perhaps better known round these parts as a blogger at Big Picture - though he doesn’t blog enough these days. Simon gave a presentation that showed a very thorough understanding of the mobile channel and a willingness to invest in it while it’s being established and while it’s also hard for agencies to make money.
I especially liked Mindshare’s “Value Exchange” concept for advertising in this new, new world: “Attention is exchanged in return for Entertainment, Relevance and/or Usefulness”. This is a very similar to the concept I was writing about a while back, when I suggested that effective mobile advertising should be based on an IDEA or giving the consumer one (or all) of the following:
Information
Deals
Engagement
Advertainment
So the Mindshare proposition resonated strongly.
The MMA also announced the appointment of a permanent Managing Director in the form of Paul Berney. While the MMA in EMEA has had a great first year, a full time employee focused on making things happen should mean a huge leap forward in 2008.
Congratulations to all the organisers and fellow speakers. But most important of all, I always judge the quality of a conference by the quality of the delegates who’ve paid to be there. And based on all the people I met in that capacity, it was truly a great conference, representing an exciting, vibrant young industry that has finally taken off big time.