I was happy to attend the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Engage for Mobile conference on 16th June 2010.
Mobile is big right now. Well, to be precise it has been ‘the next big thing’ for about ten years. WAP was meant to ignite the world but was ultimately a bit of a damp squib. Now, however, there is genuine excitement in the water.
The conference was held at the Millbank Media and Cinema Centre in London. This is a wonderful venue. The organisation of this event was first class, and also featured perhaps the richest cakes to exist in the universe. The general set-up of the auditorium was excellent and, barring some minor microphone hiccups from time to time, provided a fantastic platform for the speakers.
Steve Heald and Spencer McHugh of Orange were present. Orange’s branding is certainly distinctive but quite wearing when used throughout a Powerpoint presentation. Their Orange Wednesdays promotion is exceptionally well known and an interesting fact to emerge was that some films are now released on Wednesdays in order to take advantage! This and some other case studies did highlight how their marketing was successful using purely ‘normal’ mobile features such as messaging and not dedicated applications. Not an iPhone in sight!
Orange also produced an App for Glastonbury. It was given away free. Although this was never strictly an ‘Orange thing’ the results were that 80% of people exposed reacted positively to the brand.
Matt Brittin from Google demonstrated some of their recent technology. Naturally the bulk of this was on an Android device. Speech recognition for search and, even more impressively, language translation was shown. The best was the demonstration of Google Goggles which can show information on everything from landmarks to artwork, searched for as a result of the user taking a photograph with their device. Now, none of this is particularly new for those that follow the company but it highlights how everything with mobile is starting to become more seamless and less fiddly!
Nic Newman from Tigerspike and Maani Safa from Telegraph Media Group talked about a few things, including their World Cup application. This has been an incredible success for them. I particularly loved how it encouraged voting by the users and the results of that voting could be seen on a geographical basis. For example, it could be seen which parts of the world were more likely to support a certain country! Seamless social interaction on mobile which I always love to see.
Mark Freeman of Movement gave an outstanding and engaging presentation. His theme was on the differences between ‘heads up’ and ‘heads down’ mobile. ‘Heads down’ being the likes of just sitting there texting or checking email. ‘Heads up’? Things that are genuinely socially engaging. He ran a quick gameshow as a demo: Text him for the chance to win a Darth Vader Pez dispenser! Plenty of other examples were shown, including Nokia having a ‘textable’ giant sign which would respond and point as commanded and display the messages as well. Lots of video of the public interacting with the brand directly and having lots of fun there.
Mark was successful as he stuck to a few key points and really hammered them home with interesting dynamic examples. The theme of the conference was ‘Engage’ so this is what I wanted to be seeing.
Unfortunately, most of the afternoon presentations did not have this engagement. I’m not going to dissect them now. I will simply say this: Be passionate about what you are presenting. If the idea is to talk about the amazing things that your company has done or can offer, you have to look like you truly mean it and enjoy it. If you are not engaged by your own ideas, why would you expect your audience to be?
Also, less is more. Mountains of spreadsheets and graphs do not make a good presentation. Sometimes there were just not any pauses and I found myself drifting off and just not particularly caring any more. I really can’t remember much of what was said.
One nice fact came out of it though: There is an app, for your iPhone, which locates the nearest payphone for you. And it costs £2.99. GENIUS.
Everyone woke up when Roman Weishäupl of Trend One gave an amazing presentation. He was so energised and enthusiastic. He was speaking about the possibilities of the future, concentrating on augmented reality, but it was clearly he was passionate about it. See, this is the difference: He wasn’t just reading his notes verbatim or over-reliant on overloaded Powerpoint slides. HE MEANT IT. Anyone who can get the audience to hold hands for time travel at the beginning of their speech is doing something very right.
I love the potential of augmented reality. It just feels so much like science fiction at times but the technology to power it already exists in so many areas! Just a case of joining up the dots.
In all, I did pick up some good ideas from this conference but the afternoon flagged. Top up the roster with those who are genuinely excited about what they are doing and know how to get it across. Then this conference will genuinely be able to use the word ‘Engage’ in its title!
Oh, OpenMarket win my award for best ‘goodie bag’ item: Very, very nice drinks bottle which is going to come with me on the London to Brighton cycle ride this year! Please sponsor me!
