
The Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK has just released a best practice guideline report called ‘Mobile Advertising: the Emerging UK Market” . The report is an excellent introduction to mobile advertising as well as a snapshot of the market right now. It includes the Mobile Marketing Association’s EMEA guidelines for mobile advertising published last September but still current.

“If you find yourself with a brick through your windscreen [Ed: that’s ‘windshield’ for you Yanks], the one thing you’re guaranteed to have on your person is a mobile.” So says Chris Smith, online marketing manager of Autoglass in the UK, in an excellent interview on e-consultancy .

We just spent an enjoyable afternoon at the MTM London Mobile Advertising Roundtable, a private event for marketers. MTM assembled an excellent panel (who shall remain nameless – Chatham House Rules ) to analyze the state of mobile advertising, its drivers, obstacles to growth and forecasts.
The themes echoed those of recent Mobile Marketing Forum [http://www.mobilemarketingforum.com/] events:
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For mobile content players, discovery is the big challenge. How do you get people to experience your .mobi for the first time?
Do you get your content on to the operator’s portals (‘on deck’)? Do you go direct, and help people to find and enter your URL on their own (‘off deck’)? A combination of both?
An informal survey among the mobirati indicates that the US market is about 30% off-deck and 70% on-deck while the European market is the reverse. Any thoughts about why this should be the case are welcome.
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Nick Fisher of Marvellous, one of the UK’s top mobile agencies, recently shared his thoughts on mobile marketing.
Nick identifies ‘The Big Three of Mobile Marketing’ as:
Which feels like a tight way to think about your mobile strategies. A campaign can do any combination of these, but if you’re using mobile, it should probably be doing at least one of them.

Anders Hansson, from Infonu in Stockholm alerted us to their eBook,, “How To Go Mobile”. Here’s a short excerpt, nine reasons to consider mobile marketing… (Thanks Anders!)
2. You communicate directly to consumers wherever they are.

Pot Noodle is a wonderfully anarchic UK brand. They bring their attitude and energy to the mobile platform with a fun site potnoodle.mobi.
Check out the “Tipping Pot” video – a very funny spoof of the famous Guinness ad. As they put it, “Who needs Argentineans and a massive budget when you've got a flatulent drunk and some old shopping trolleys?”
If the two pillars of mobile web marketing are utility and entertainment, these guys come down firmly on the side of the latter – and pull it off.

Mobile marketing calls for a different kind of creativity. Marching into your creative agency, showing them a tiny banner spec and saying, “Good luck” is not going to get you much.
What seems to be emerging as we listen to some of the mobile pioneers at the Mobile Marketing Forum this week is that creativity lives in different places in the mobile marketing world. The challenges for any creative team looks more like these:

A clear theme that emerged from the Mobile Marketing Forum in New York this week is that the entire marketing industry is pushing itself up a steep learning curve called mobile marketing.
The cost is borne by every player in the value chain. Brand marketers must invest time, money and effort getting up to speed. Agencies must learn everything just to able to present a few things to their clients. They then have to spend an enormous amount of time educating the clients.

Here are our mobiThinking impressions as day one of the Mobile Marketing Forum in New York draws to a close:
This joint is jumping
800 people. The networking area is packed non-stop. People doing real business. Badge-watch: some of the world’s biggest brands. In media, travel, entertainment, consumer brands… We’re not in Kansas any more.