Mobile a Diverse Challenge, says Cokes Jude Brooks

Hello from the third IAB Mobile Engage conference, where the theme is Challenge Your Marketing Strategy, and where, during the Mythbusters panel, Coca Cola digital activation manager Jude Brooks shone some light on big brands relationship with mobile advertisng.

“Its very easy to spend £5m on a TV ad, where you have a good idea of what youre buying,” she said. “Its very comfortable. Youve got years and years of data and experience spending, in a medium you know works. Whereas on mobile, the challenge is so diverse.”

She also pointed to the cost of implementing mobile infrastructure, which splits budgets, as a barrier to entry for brands. Not the most promising picture, but she also added that mobile advertising is growing without cannibalising other digital media. “Mobile comes out of the same pot,” Brooks said, “but that pot is growing”.

The panel asked four questions of its panellists and – via the high-tech medium of pieces of paper with thumbs on them – the audience: whether the mobile web has a poor user experience (to which around three quarters of the audience said yes), whether its true that mobile doesnt have the scale to warrant serious brand investment (which, encouraging, saw a overwhelming thumbs down response from the room), whether mobile advertising is too complex (a 50/50 split) and whether mobile advertising is cannibalising online ad spend (which three quarters of the audience disagreed with).

The panel followed presentations from Twitter, and Google, showing off the swish new Chrome app browser for Android, with its gesture browsing, solution for browsing non-optimised sites on mobile, and ability to sync up search history across multiple devices.

Twitter UK sales director Bruce Daisley then gave a one word presentation, the word in question being Interstices. He then cheated, using other words – and some funny images – to explain how people use their phone to fill the gaps. By which, of course, he meant tweeting on your phone while in the toilet – 80 per cent of Twitters 10m active users in the UK tweet on their mobile.