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Openwave and the Mobile Marketing Association jointly hosted a Mobile Marketing roundtable at 3GSM, chaired by Johan Othelius, Openwave's Area Vice President -Marketing EMEA.
Participating in the discussion were media heavyweight CNN (Turner Broadcasting), Cake Media, the agency responsible for the global Budweiser "wassup?" advertising campaign and mobile marketing companies FLYTXT, Enpocket, Active Media and FIRST HOP. Mike Short, MM02's CTO, represented the Mobile Data Association. Operator participants included representatives from MM02, TIM, T-Mobile and BT. The objective of the discussion was to highlight successful mobile marketing case studies, and identify obstacles the industry faces. Mitch Lazar, CNN's Senior Vice President Wireless shared his company's strategy of providing mobile operators with a free java client that enables sponsored advertising via a "ticker" that appears above content on a user's handset. CNN is working with Xerox, who is sponsoring the initial campaign. Subscribers can easily subscribe to the service by sending a text message. Early results from the "ticker" advertisement are very positive and the concept is attracting interest from media companies and consumer brands. Pamir Gelenbe, FLYTXT CEO, shared his knowledge of the Japanese market, where mobile advertising is already an established channel. In Japan, agencies include mobile as part of their media buying strategy. This must start happening in Europe if mobile marketing is to attract the attention of companies with large advertising budgets. Nick Wiggin, Chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), shared the vision of the MMA. The MMA is actively evangelizing mobile marketing to advertising agencies and large consumer brands. The association is attracting huge interest from traditional advertising agencies wanting to learn more about how to successfully reach consumers through the mobile channel. 2005 has started with a bang due to fantastic new handsets capable of media-rich marketing campaigns including video. Jez Jowett, of Cake Media, stressed that the youth market of today is very savvy when it comes to marketing; they are not willing to be "marketed to" in traditional ways. This has direct implications for operators since the youth market is responsible for generating so much data ARPU. Everyone stressed that the most successful campaigns are the ones that incorporate various media channels (mobile, print, TV, mobile). They agreed that MMS, the preferred method for mobile marketing, has not been successful due to provisioning issues and volume limits relating to bulk messaging campaigns. To ensure that mobile marketing campaigns are successful, mobile operators must address these technology issues. Openwave is working closely with the mobile marketing industry as well as its customers to eliminate technical barriers and to provide mobile marketing solutions and technology for the industry.
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