iMedia’s Breakthrough Summit: Notes from Florida
Last week, I was back again in Coconut Point, Fla., for another iMedia event. This time it was the Breakthrough Summit, chock full of great and timely information about marketing, advertising and the intersection with consumers and social media. 
One of the most optimistic messages I took away from Florida was contained in a survey that iMedia did on Breakthrough Summit attendees. Among other findings, 33% cited of the brands and agencies in the audience cited “mobile” as the platform they’re most interested in for near-term marketing efforts. Nearly 70% of them see large-scale mobile advertising initiatives achieving real scale in just two years.
That's our iMedia sales person, Keri Albers, on the right along with the CEO of 4Info, Zaw Thet. 4Info has got a cool complementary service to ours. They insert ads into the last 40 characters of a text message.
Gene Keenan, vice president of mobile services at Isobar, a digital marketing services company, talked about mobile marketing in his keynote. The good news: He pointed out that there are 50 million mobile Web users in the United States. He recalled that when the Internet usage hit 50 million people in the mid-1990s, really interesting things started happening.
The downside (for now) involves a couple of annoying roadblocks to mobile nirvana: One, handsets can’t be cookied, so understanding conversions is tricky, and, two, targeting is not effective. In an interview with iMedia Connection’s Matt Kapko, Keenan said:
“Outside of doing media buys directly with carriers and a few publishers, there is no way to really do accurate targeting, particularly if you want to target specific designated market areas.”
That’s one way of looking at targeting. We look at it differently. In our voice and visual world, the mobile user effectively targets herself by her actions. Our in-call advertising campaigns target, for example, based on intention. So if a person is calling for movie show times, studios can insert ads for SMS text reminders for when future movies are about to premier. And businesses local to the theater can insert messages as well.
And to any questions about understanding conversion rates in a mobile world, ask a restaurant. 
If a local restaurant offers a digital coupon text-messaged to a user as part of a message campaign, the local restaurant can see its conversions live and in color as they seat them at a table. And the process maintains anonymity and privacy.
I picked up a “humanity” thread from Shelly Palmer, who writes MediaBytes. In his “Digital Power User Crash Course” presentation, he called for everyone to bridge the “socio-techno divide.” He noted, for example, that some lawmakers were Tweeting from the floor the night President Obama delivered the State of the Union address. It was bad form, he argued, because they weren’t adept at the medium.
What might have been better would be to have staff prepare a few Tweets in advance, targeted to certain policy messages. He noted it’s not the technology; it’s the people.
While there, I participated in a speed-dating session. Now it’s not something that my wife should be nervous about. It was called “One-minute Match-Ups” – a great networking opportunity. I got to introduce Apptera to over 60 brands and agencies in 90-minutes, spending about 90 seconds with each one before the buzzer rang and I had to move to the next chair. On the right are a few pictures the organizers took of this frenzied event.
I made a lot of good connections and have tons of follow-up with the great folks I met there.
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