MarCom Professional

I popped down to MoMo London (Mobile Monday London) last night, which was held at the CBI Conference Center in Centre Point Tower.

Titled “Enabling Location in Applications”, the evening was sponsored by Skyhook Wireless. Whereas the last MoMo London featured a high-level panel discussion on current mobile trends from a media and marketing perspective, this event was more of a show and tell.

The people presenting their ideas were:

• Ted Morgan – Skyhook Wireless
• Ben Ward – Yahoo! Brickhouse
  
• Charles Wiles - Google Gears
• Andrew Scott – Rummble
• Justin Davis - BuddyPing
• Mark White - Locatrix

There were also some special guests in the from of various representatives of MoMo from around the world, including Germany, Estonia, Sweden, Spain, Boston, Italy and New York. More...

The Q1 2008 Bellwether Report, the quarterly survey of marketing spend published by the IPA, reveals that current budgets have again been revised down for the second consecutive quarter; suggesting business confidence has fallen further. All sectors of the industry have experience cuts with the exception of spend on internet marketing suggesting that budgets are being diverted into this area. Budgets are predicted to fall further as a result on low corporate profitability through the end of the year. More...

Congratulations to Rainier PR newbie Matt Watson who’s made this month’s Seventy Seven UK cut of the AdAge Top Marketing Bloggers, in at no 57.

That lower-price, better-connected iPhone idea seems to have done the trick for Apple. According to The Telegraph, interest in the 3G iPhone is almost four times more than the interest in its 2G predecessor. 02 claim that more than 130,000 people have registered interest, where as only 35,000 people pre-registered their interest before. It’s worth noting that, according to O2’s chief executive, who says that iPhone customers are spending 30% more a year on their mobile bills on average.

However, I shall be shunning the new iPhone for a downgrade from my current phone - the Nokia 7500 Live Lite to the Nokia Classic 6500. More...

So when Simon and I were asked to go to the conference, we were given a remit to talk around how to make mobile ads work. The conference were keen for us to cover overcoming the hurdles to ad delivery in a delivery type way.

And we thought..

Nah..

You see, ads are about brands talking to people, in the hope that they will become customers. They’re not about mechanistically delivering stuff to someone. So we thought it would be good if we could maybe talk about actual adverts. The art of advertising.

So I did a little presentation that covered ‘normal’, non mobile adverts. And me being me, I covered adverts for beer, cigarettes and meatballs. More...

As mentioned earlier this week, the Creative Director and I attended the 2008 make money by flogging stuff on mobile conference on Monday. The crowd were pretty much all mobile technology or network people, with some agency representatives, consultants and analysts thrown in. All in all quite an interesting bunch, with some senior and seasoned experts putting in their pennies worth. We were, I believe, the only pure-play mobile ad agency there, if there were others, they kept pretty quiet.

The day was a game of two halves. In the morning we heard about some of the limitations and possibilities around mobile technology driven solutions and technical issues and barriers around advertising on the channel. More...

We all know banner ads are largely ineffective - exactly as Scoble outlined two years ago. They are only trusted by barely a quarter of consumers, while those that click on them are the wrong demographic and don’t correspond to brand value. It means a waste of up to $1bn a year. No wonder Adblock for Firefox has been downloaded over 20 million times.

The less effective they are, the more jarring and interfering they have become to try and wring every last drop of attention out of their audience, so thanks to Scott Monty for highlighting this tongue-in-cheek look from current.tv at just how bad banner advertising has become: More...

AdMob have released stats (focusing on Western European data) from traffic on the network during May. Here’s a few of the key points -

- 65.1% of ad requests in Western Europe came from the UK.

- Mobile internet usage has increased across the region with Spain showing the most rapid traffic growth with a 270% increase since September 2007.

- The iPhone is also grabbing a significant market share across Europe, dominating the top 10 device rankings in France, Germany the Netherlands and Spain.

- Network ad impressions increased 16.9% compared to the previous month, up from 2.56 billion to 3.03 billion. More...

The Creative Director and I are in Belgium today for another mobile advertising event. This one is all about maximising revenues.

The Creative Director has a rather unique presentation up his sleeve. He’s not going to talk about mobile mechanics, techniques, measurement or ROI. He’s not even going to show examples of cool campaigns. Actually, and quite radically, in my opinion, he’s going to talk about pure creativity and how necessity can be the mother of invention.

We’re not sure how this is going to go down, but I think this kind of thinking is just what the mobile advertising channel needs. More...