Optism™

This week’s roundup focuses on insights from the Mobile Marketing Association’s recent London Forum.

Mobile Marketing provided a quick summary of the London Forum as events were wrapping up. Editor David Murphy quoted the MMA’s Paul Berney: “The time for evangelising the mobile channel is past. It’s time to educate and execute. We have moved from why to how.” He went on to note that in spite of compelling examples from leading brands, advertisers are still having problems justifying budget for mobile. His advice? “Companies doing great stuff on mobile [need] to keep banging home the same message – that it works.” In the end, their success will prove the case. Read the rest of this entry »

At msearchgroove this week, feature contributor our own Lisa Cianguilli reflects on why some companies shine while others merely survive. She sees a parallel between the leaders of these forward-thinking companies and the kids in high school who had the confidence to take the road less travelled. For mobile operators, there are tangible benefits to being a leader. To learn more, read the article.

This week, we’ve collected insights from all over the ecosystem on mobile marketing on how we’re doing as an industry and what to look forward to in the near future.

Untether.tv provides a platform for industry thought leader Tomi Ahonen to deliver his impressions of where mobile is heading. Tomi tells us that while he doesn’t subscribe to the theory that the Internet has changed everyone’s lives, he does believe mobile is doing that. He acknowledges that the impact is uneven across the globe, and that this uneven adoption is currently limiting the global presence of some applications. Tomi talks about how many emerging economies are moving directly to mobile, which is easier and cheaper to implement due to the much smaller infrastructure requirements. As a result, these economies are often faster to implement leading-edge mobile services. Still, as a whole, Tomi believes the world is under-utilizing the mobile marketing opportunity with only 3 percent of media spend directed to mobile. He concludes with a discussion of how 13 industries (with a global value of 5 trillion U.S. dollars) will be entirely reshaped – or eliminated – as mobile take off. Read the rest of this entry »