I attended Mobile Content World last week. The first 2 days were standard conference fare, a few keynotes, a couple of panels, a few sales pitches thrown in for good measure. Day 3 was a mobile advertising day, my special topic, and I personally found that day to be far more compelling.

There were a few highlights for me, and a few disappointments. Certainly the event was lacking in the enthusiasm & passion you would expect to emanate from a collection of people at the cutting edge of an emerging industry like mobile. There was a sense of ‘same-old, same-old’ from a lot of participants, and many of the panels felt a little tired. Haven’t we had this debate before? Can I comment without getting approval from PR in advance?

That said, there were numerous interesting speakers and plenty of people to meet in the break-out sessions. I’ve summarised some of my thoughts below, and apologise for focusing predominantly on topics of my own personal interest. I just didn’t have the time to cover all the presenters, topics & themes from all three days.

Day 1

I enjoyed hearing from Nicholas Heller from Google UK and local emerging technologies Product Specialist Justin Baird. The focus was not particularly local, but I was impressed with the Android demo and found myself quite inspired about the possibilities.

Bill Burton from Telstra spoke convincingly and honestly, which in itself was a feat for a Senior Telstra executive. The carrier panel was weighed down by cagey responses to audience comments, and the ever-popular but sadly half hearted debate around carriers being data pipes. The overriding message from each carrier was their newfound openness to off-deck content and the crumbling of walled gardens. Time & again we heard variations on the same theme “we want our users to embrace the mobile web”.

Amanda Brook (Head of Mobile at Sensis) spoke on day three about Mobile Advertising, Michael Beresford spoke on usability and Scott Taylor covered Mobile TV on day two. The combined impact of Amanda, Scott, Michael B, Michael Padden & Bill Burton did Telstra proud, as the company came out looking smart, open and well informed about the mobile industry locally. I say this regardless of the validity of their strategy. As a recent ex-employee of Sensis working on mobile strategy, it would be unfair of me to comment either way. Conversely, as an ex-employee I am not easily impressed as I can see straight through a whitewash, so my respect is probably harder to earn than that of an outsider! Either way, Telstra presented a strong front this year.

The carriers focussed a lot on the importance of customer targeting for the delivery of mobile content & advertising, and all repeated the message that beyond the data pipe, carriers provide access to location, billing relationships and the all important customer data to facilitate mobile interactions. A couple of difficult audience questions however revealed some of the uncomfortable truths behind the PR:

Dominique Lee: When will you all be launching wap billing?
Carriers: Umm
Vodafone: “you will probably see something in the next…. unspecified timeframe”
Audience: ROFL

Antony McGregor Dey: How easy is it for customers to engage with Carrier APIs?
Carriers: Really hard :-/

Paz Saveedra presented News Digital’s mobile strategy, with a nice demonstration of the ‘big web’ personalisation capability behind m.news.com.au . I liked the way News lets you interactively define your mobile experience online. On the flip side, when I saw the tedious sign up procedure I couldn’t back out fast enough. It’s a shame that big organisations need to justify really useful innovations by implementing usability killers like lengthy sign-ups. Coming from that world, I do get it. But win my heart now and I’ll share my details later.

Paz was open about the fact that the opportunity to earn advertising revenue was part of the reason News launched an off-deck mobile site. She is not alone in the industry in finding that the most difficult part of that equation is to engage with advertising media in the mobile medium. There is an urgent need to educate advertisers & their agencies, not to mention the internal sales teams of publishers like Fairfax.

Of obvious importance to advertisers is also the number of users they can target via the mobile site. News Digital uses print, online & SMS shortcode methods to generate mobile traffic. They are also spending time investigating SEO for their mobile sites. Chris Watt from Fairfax was another publisher to agree that after signing up advertisers, traffic was the number one priority. As with News, Fairfax has access to a variety of proprietary channels for generating traffic, but NineMSN revealed that Carrier portals & SMS Shortcodes were the most successful techniques for them.

Dinuke Ranasinghe from PayPal talked about Mobile commerce, which I admit is not my special topic. That said I watch PayPal mobile with interest and will be keen to see how the product rolls out in terms of adoption locally. Dinuke told us that Paypal will launch eBay mobile checkout soon in Australia and this is likely to have a big impact on mobile uptake, not just for eBay but also other PayPal facilitated transaction sites.