I spent yesterday evening at an event organized by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and The Marketing Society (TMS). The event was the first in a series of ‘Brand & Agency Briefings’, designed to provide an opportunity to hear directly from leading brands and agency thinkers on how they are using the mobile channel today, and what they plan to do next.
The turnout was excellent, more than 200 people, and according to the MMA’s Managing Director, Europe, Paul Berney, of the 325 people who registered for the event – yes, some people ducked out at the last minute to watch Coronation St. – 65% were from brands or agencies. Personally, I’d like to see that figure broken down further; my suspicion is always that brands don’t turn out to these kinds of event, but talking to Jonathan Bass from Incentivated and Alex Meisl from Sponge, it appears client-side marketers were pretty well represented last night.
Like the rest of us, they were treated to some top-quality presentations, and drinks courtesy of Mobile Interactive Group, MX Telecom and O2 Media. The presentations came from Chris Carmichael, Director of Innovation at British Airways, Steve Wing, Head of Business Development at Guardian News and Media, and Rory Sutherland, Co-Chairman of Ogilvy Group and President of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), and for whom the only apt description is indefatigable, not to mention entertaining. I stopped taking notes after five minutes of his presentation and just sat back and enjoyed it. If he ever gets bored doing the day job, a career on the after-dinner circuit surely beckons.
The most interesting thing about the other two presentations was the sense that both BA and The Guardian were getting into mobile because they were afraid of missing the boat, though to be fair, BA did launch a WAP check-in service back in 2000, before removing it a year later.
“We want to be part of this” said Carmichael. “We have to be involved” said Wing, and later: “This is now too compelling a market for us to ignore…This is the beginning of forever for us for publishing on mobile devices…It’s too disruptive not to take part.”
Everyone in the mobile marketing business is fed up to the back teeth of hearing that this will be the year of mobile, or that it’s finally reached its tipping point, but what I took from last night was the sense that the dominoes are slowly beginning to tumble, as one brand after another launches a mobile site or a mobile app or a mobile campaign. In many, even most, cases, they’re not doing it because they are passionate about the mobile channel. Rather, they are responding to consumer behaviour. (Now do you get that headline?) As more people avail themselves of a phone with a browser, and as more people find out about and sign up to a flat-rate data plan – who remembers dial up on the Internet? – and as more people realise there are better ways to spend an idle 10 minutes at the bus stop than watching the world go by, then mobile browsing will continue to increase and more people will click on more mobile ads and who knows, those companies and those people on the mobile marketing coalface who really are passionate about the mobile channel, might finally start making some proper money out of it.
I’ll drink to that.

David Murphy
Editor