I’m at the IAB’s Mobile Engage event in London. I missed the morning sessions as we were running an event of our own, but everything I’ve heard since I arrived has reminded me how good the IAB are at putting on events like this.
I arrived just in time to hear the conclusion of an unsurprisingly thorough presentation on mobile metrics from Velti’s Kelaine Olvera. She was followed by the IAB’s own Jon Mew, whose session on creativity in mobile was a whistle-stop tour of neat applications of mobile technology in advertising, apps and other media, all designed to open the minds of the brand and agency representatives in the audience to what they can do on mobile. Which, of course, is pretty much anything.
That was followed by a heavyweight panel debate featuring Unilever, Procter & Gamble, the COI and Sky, and then a Dragon’s Den debate in which three protagonists – Google’s Nic Cumisky, Simon Andrews from Addictive Mobile, and David Fieldhouse from Lucidity Mobile, pitched for a virtual investment in, respectively, NFC, QR codes, and Augmented Reality. Cumisky and NFC won.
And so to the final presentation of the day, which is, traditionally, the slot no one speaking at a conference wants, more unpopular even than the one immediately after lunch. So who would step up to the plate? None other than Professor Brian Cox, OBE, known to many for his appearances on the BBC, presenting science programmes.
Two things to say about Professor Cox. Firstly, he looks barely a day over 30 (he’s 43, according to Wikipedia). Secondly, he’s a brilliant, brilliant speaker, very funny, even talking, as he is, about particle physics. He has made a passing reference to the role of the Cern laboratory, where he does some work, in the creation of the World Wide Web, but beyond that, he’s stuck fairly firmly to particle physics. A few minutes ago, in fact, he showed us a 4-line equation called the Standard Model of Particle Physics, (see here for more on this) which, in his words “describes everything in the universe other than the force of gravity (including) the way atoms and molecules stick together and the way the stars shine”. 
He’s just finishing up talking about the controversy over the work done at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Cern and the scare stories, when it first went into service in 2008, that it might destroy the earth (remember?). He shared the reaction of some of his scientific colleagues to the stories, before telling delegates about his own. He was quoted in the Radio Times saying: “Anyone who thinks that the LHC will destroy the world is a tw*t.”
Professor Cox’s speech didn’t have an awful lot to do with mobile marketing, though when that was put to him, he replied that if governments want to stimulate innovation at grass roots level, they have to invest in the Blue Sky stuff. But frankly, I couldnt care less. Whoever decided to book him for today’s event deserves a huge pat on the back.
David Murphy
Editor
