I’ve just returned for a 2-day Mobile Marketing Association conference in Budapest. I’ll share more later as I catch up, but in the meantime, I thought you’d be interested to hear a little about how the famed P&G sees mobile marketing.

Khurram Hamid is the Global Head of Mobile Marketing for Procter & Gamble and gave a great keynote on Day 2. The fact that P&G have such a role and that the incumbent is happy to present at an MMA event shows how quickly mobile marketing is moving from niche to mainstream. We’ve got a long way to go yet, but we’re going to get there.

Khurram’s focus is actually on using mobile to reach emerging market consumers, with special focus on BRIC markets. While mobile marketing might be a great medium in developed economies, it really is the only game in town in terms of available media in certain parts of the world. These people don’t have a TV, PC and in many cases, no access to other older media such as newspapers. But they do have mobiles or at least access to mobiles.

To make his point, Khurram showed this very inspiring video - only a couple of minutes long, but certainly worth a click!

So, P&G see mobile marketing as a way of reaching the next Billion consumers. This shows that these guys really do put innovative thinking at the heart of their strategies as I’m very sure that this is an angle that many global brands have missed so far.

Another very interesting point that Khurram made, which is worth reminding ourselves of; innovation in new media often is driven by the client and not by the agencies. This is what happened in the early days of the PC web, where clients often had to tell their agencies to deliver or threaten to go elsewhere if they couldn’t.

So if you’re a brand marketer, drop your agency a note and ask why aren’t they making mobile a line item on next year’s budget. Because if they don’t understand the importance of mobile, you’ll go and find a company who does….