Last week saw the MMA's Mobile Marketing Forum in Berlin and jolly good it was too. If you missed it, I'd say that you missed the best mobile marketing conference in the last 10 years, with a chance to hear from brands like BMW, Coke, Nike and Pepsi - and to mix with these pioneering thought-leaders them too. It really felt that mobile marketing had passed its tipping point and had finally come of age. It's been a long wait, but it'll be worth it in the end.
My own contribution was a speech which looked at the "Future" of mobile advertising. Rather than share the whole thing in one go, I'm going to split it into a few topics so you don't get faced with one mega-post.
In my introduction, I showed a brief clip of the mall scene from the cult film Minority Report. If you haven't seen it, the 36 second clip can be viewed here, but the idea is that our hero, John Anderton, gets bombarded by personalised ads as he walks along. Ads call to him by name, having recognised him by scanning his rentinas(!) and - just as spooky - others which aren't suited to his profile, stay silent. Having showed the clip, I suggested that such a level of personalisation and intrusiveness would never be tolerated!
However, the clip was useful in exploring some areas to talk about and the first one was the role of Brands in the future of mobile advertising - in the film, Guinness and Lexus futuristic ads were featured.
As a brief history of mobile advertising, when we started off, it was mainly mobile content players who were advertising, such as ringtones and games. There were exceptions to this - Adidas was the first major brand to leap in, if I remember correctly - but they were very early and certainly visionary. However, as the available inventory scaled and word of the effectiveness spread, major brands started to come on board. The real catalyst was the iPhone, as suddenly agency creative directors and clients alike experienced the potential of mobile for the first time.
I didn't really need to labour this point with such a line up of great brands actually presenting about what they had done (as opposed to intended to do at some point), but it was certainly worth pointing out. However, it was worth highlighting that we've already passed the significant milestone of the first $1 million++ campaigns, so the days of purely experimental budgets - read "loss making for agencies" - are behind us. Or as Coke suggested, "Mobile advertising is moving from test to full integration".
If there was one quote that was repeated by brands pretty consistently it was "...and here's our iPhone App...", which demonstrates that mobile marketing is quickly moving beyond purist mobile advertising, which is a theme I've been writing about here pretty consistently. So if you've been ignoring my observations until now, get with the programme, or get left behind.
