I’m at a Media Roundtable event organised by the UK arm of the Mobile Marketing Association, where Alex Meisl, co-Chair of the recently-launched UK Council, has just outlined the Council’s priorities over the next 12 months. These fall into three areas: networking, education and regulation.
I was impressed by what Meisl had to stay. The networking initiative, which will be led by fellow co-Chair Scott Seaborn, will concentrate on organising networking events, one per quarter, targeting, in Meisl’s words: “decision makers who will cause the industry to grow”. So what the MMA is doing, quite simply, is introducing client-side marketers to the concept of mobile marketing in an informal environment. Hardly rocket science, but just what the industry needs if it is to move forward.
This initiative segues neatly into the second focus area: education. Here, the UK Council has taken the somewhat brave decision to say that on the whole, the agency world is now pretty much au fait with what mobile marketing is and does. So it is concentrating its efforts, again, on client-side marketers. Meisl cited a study showing that only 8% of Fortune 500 companies had a mobile strategy, as evidence that there is considerable potential to educate client-side marketers in this respect.
To this end, then, the UK Council will organise a series of workshops, one a month, targeted at industry verticals, so one for FMCG, one for automotive, one for retail and so on. These will expose marketers working in those sectors to mobile marketing campaigns, showing how mobile has been and could be used in their sector.
Again, I think this is an excellent idea, with two caveats. The first is the methods employed to get the marketers to turn up. My experience of mobile conferences is that client-side representation is often pretty thin. In this respect, the fact that the MMA’s workshops will be free should help. Meisl also says that for larger corporations, the workshops will come to them.
The second is this assumption that the ad-world now gets mobile. Meisl inferred that the decision to target marketers exclusively through these workshops had not been an easy one, and it seems to me a dangerous assumption to make. But Meisl argued that if the MMA can enthuse client-side marketers, they will then go back to the brands and demand that it is included in their marketing plans.
I hope he’s right, and I do applaud the courage of the UK Council’s strategy to go to the people who make the final decisions and control the purse-strings.

David Murphy
Editor