Mobile Marketing Association Mobile Forum Analysis @ Mobile Marketer » mobilegroove

I’m back from the Mobile Marketing Association’s Mobile Marketing Forum event in London and recovered from a cold I picked up along the way. The event, which drew over 250 professionals, practitioners and execs from brands and agencies, was sharply focused on real numbers and real results.

In my book it’s a welcome confirmation that the MMA (and the industry it represents) has moved beyond explaining the opportunities in mobile marketing to executing on them. (You can read more coverage and commentary at #MMAFLDN on Twitter.)

Indeed, it’s exciting times and I look forward to featuring the companies and case studies (BMW, BestBuy, Unilever, Praekelt Consulting) on MSG in the coming weeks.

Mobile Marketer guest column

Meantime, my esteemed friend and colleague David Murphy also attended the event and produced a series of in-depth video interviews for Mobile Marketing Magazine. Speakers include: Jay Altschuler, Unilever Global Communication Planning Director; Paul Berney, MMA CMO & Managing Director EMEA; and Jude Brooks, Jude Brooks, Coca-Cola Europe Interactive Marketing Manager. Some are posted here and a few are still in the pipeline, so I encourage you to check them out here.

I also contributed my own views to Mobile Marketer, a news site I highly respect for its overage of what matters in mobile marketing. My thanks to Mickey Alam Khan for inviting me to contribute this analysis and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

You can read the full post on Mobile Marketer here.

Mobile consumer insights from EA, Buzzcity

I also want to take this opportunity to thank my panel participants (image below) Ralph Risk, Marketing Director EMEA, Lightspeed Research; Jonathan McKay, Creative Director, Praekelt Consulting; Hisham Isa, VP Marketing and CMO, Buzzcity; Elizabeth Harz, Senior VP, Global Media Sales, Electronic Arts (EA).

My personal thanks to Robert Haslam, an account executive at MiLiberty, who was kind enough to record the complete Consumer Insight panel.  I’ll have that video and more analysis later in the week.

A high point of the Insight session was exploring the many ways brands can gain consumer insights and piece together how people behave across platform and devices.

Interestingly, mobile publishers and social networks have the inside track on much of this – data they can gather with little effort and complete accuracy. Elizabeth Harz, for example, reports that some 35 percent of mobile gamers play games every day. As she put it: “There is incredible engagement here worthy of your brands.”

To drive home the new role of EA as a “partner to brands” Elizabeth points out that EA has recently taken the wraps off a “comprehensive insights suite.” The cross-platform tool pulls together campaign performance, brand impact, social buzz, and where available, ROI, across all platforms on the EA network, to provide marketers with actionable consumer data based on their activity in and around EA games.

Likewise Buzzcity, a mobile social network and mobile ad network, is also gleaning valuable information and observations about mobile users. As Hisham puts it: “Our core business is advertising. Our customers [brands and agencies] expect us to know what users are doing, who they are and what campaigns can work.” To this end Buzzcity conducts informal survey and “gathers permission-based responses” from users worldwide.

Mobile Consumer Briefing from Lightspeed

And – in case you missed it – Ralph used the panel session to reveal his company’s latest consumer research findings from the Mobile Consumer Briefing covering the U.K., France and Germany.

• On average, 45 percent of consumers noticed mobile advertising and of these, 29 percent responded to it
• Once people have responded to a mobile advert over a third (39 percent) continued on to make a purchase
• In the UK and France, opted-in SMS advertising proved most effective at soliciting consumer response at 40 percent and 21 percent respectively. In an advert delivered on a website accessed on a mobile device proved to be the most effective, with 27 percent of respondents stating banner adverts as preferable
• Mobile advertising that included time sensitive special offers or discounts was cited as the most important factor leading to a purchase (35 percent UK, 31 percent Germany and 27 percent France).
• Mobile coupons accessible from phones also proved to be highly popular (34 percent UK, 29 percent Germany and 24 percent France)

My take:

The results of the latest research and the mood at the MMAF event in London clearly demonstrate that there is high awareness and efficacy of mobile marketing and advertising. It’s also interesting to note the high marks for opted-in SMS advertising that came from brands (Coca-Cola, for example) and is echoed by Lightspeed findings. The consensus is that effective marketing is a dialog — and that’s just the start of the conversation. As I point out in my column over at Mobile Marketer, the opportunity now is to tie this back in with CRM, mobile commerce and push it (with our permission) across all the screens we interact with everywhere.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 12th, 2010 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Events, Featured, Mobile Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.