It’s a busy (and fun) time of the year for mobile marketing: conference time. As we announced a couple weeks ago, Waterfall’s Matt Silk is presenting our Waiting for Superman case study at the Los Angeles MMA Forum tomorrow with Wendy Cohen from Participant Media. If you have questions for Matt and Wendy that you would like us to pass their way please let us know.
Last week we attended two conferences in New York City: Ad:Tech and Customer Engagement Technology World. Both focus on how technology can benefit marketers and marketing strategy. Here are some of the highlights from each show:
Ad:Tech
We love coming to Ad:Tech as it’s just a monster event for digital marketers. The exhibit hall was packed with attendees Tuesday and Wednesday (literally overwhelming), and we enjoyed meeting up with everyone at the various conference social events. Folks we caught up with included our friends at Mobile Messenger, Axciom, Engage121, Has Offers, MobileApp Tracking, Experience Advertising and Velti.
Between the “Mobile Marketing Zone” and numerous sessions and keynotes addressing mobile’s role in today’s marketing mix, mobile marketing once again resonated throughout this year’s show (if you’re interested have a look at Ad:Tech’s Mobile Guide).
QR codes were everywhere, but 100% only accessible to smartphone users. This was disappointing given that 3G in the exhibit hall was terrible. Would have been nice to have alternative ways to engage with the brands represented at the show.
Special thanks to Merkle for hosting an event at Hotel Gansevoort and Women in Wireless for their event at the Soho House.
Customer Engagement Technology World
Similar to the show in April, mobile is grabbing more and more attention for customer engagement marketers. Whether signage software or hardware companies, all are embracing the benefits of incorporating mobile calls to action. Some of the companies we enjoyed meeting included Pay-ease, Saddle Ranch Digital Inc., Nanonation, Omnivex and ComQi.
QR codes made an appearance on CETW’s exhibit hall floor as well (in addition to being included as a product offering by the signage companies). Was awesome to see companies building a way to connect users to the on-screen experience.
Today we would like to congratulate TakePart, Participant Media, and DonorsChoose.org, as the Mobile Marketing Association has named the Waiting For “Superman” campaign as one of four finalists in the Social Impact category for the 2011 MMA Global Mobile Marketing Awards. Winners, including Best Overall Campaign, will be announced on November 17 at the MMA Global Awards Gala in Los Angeles.
Speaking of the MMA Event in Los Angeles, on November 16 Waterfall’s SVP Matt Silk will be presenting the Waiting for “Superman” Case Study along with TakePart’s Director of Digital Campaigns & Community, Wendy Cohen, in a keynote presentation titled: “Waiting For “Superman”: How Mobile Is Helping Change the World.”
For those of you who are going to be in Los Angeles please contact us so that we can meet up. If you are looking for discounted passes, please give us a call and we’ll can help get you one straight away. It should be an amazing event to wind down what’s been a terrific year for mobile marketers.
Again, congrats to all involved for the honor bestowed upon the Waiting For “Superman” campaign (click to read the case study!). We look forward to presenting, finding out the winners and meeting up with those of you in LA in two weeks.
This week, Waterfall’s Matt Silk will be in Los Angeles presenting at the LA Mobile Entertainment Summit September 20-21. The event attracts attendees from all facets of the entertainment industry to gain insight and a vision into how mobile entertainment will evolve over time.
Headlining this year’s event is rock god and media mogul Gene Simmons, who speaks Tuesday morning in an interview with David Lucatch, president of Ortsbo.com, and Neil Stiles, CEO and President of the Variety Group. Other speakers are listed here.
Matt’s presentation, Tuesday September 20th @ 1:45PM, is titled “The Intersection of Marketing and Mobile Entertainment.” It will focus on how storytellers and marketers can use leading edge technologies to spur consumption of entertainment media through mobile. In addition to capitalizing on cross-selling opportunities, the panel discussion will explore the state-of-the-art in mobility and its usefulness to digital and traditional media alike.
If you have ideas for Matt’s panel or questions about the event, we would love to hear from you. Please post to the comments or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook @waterfallmobile. We are looking forward to a great event!
Today, our own Matt Silk is speaking in Lincoln, Nebraska for the The Lincoln Chapter of the American Marketing Association. His presentation is titled “4 Steps to Mobile Marketing Success,” during which he will outline where mobile is today, what the future holds and how marketers can stay ahead of the curve. We’re excited to meet the AMA Lincoln members and for anybody in Lincoln who would like to meet up please let us know.
Being in Lincoln also gave us the opportunity to meet up with our friends at Neebo. We always love meeting face to face and hearing about plans for engaging customers via mobile.
And for those who can’t make it to today’s presentation, please shoot us a note and we’ll be happy to fill you in on the details.
Waterfall’s Senior Vice President, Matt Silk, is a featured speaker at the Mobile Marketing Association’s CEO & CEO Summit. He will be keeping us informed throughout the week with reactions and thoughts during this signature mobile event.
Sunday night’s keynote speech was given by charity:water founder Scott Harrison. Scott related a moving story about being a club promoter in NYC who did a stint in Africa on an ocean liner that housed a roving hospital. The impact of this experience led Scott to launch an organization that sets out to bring fresh water to the one billion people without safe water access.
According to Scott’s presentation, 90% of the 30,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are of children under five years old. In Africa alone, the economic loss due to safe water and sanitation issues is $28 billion (about 5% of GDP). And because of price fixing by private water distributors, the poorest households end up spending 11% of their income on what many consider a basic human right. Based on data collected by the UN, one tenth of the global disease burden can be prevented simply by improving water supply and sanitation. charity: water, after passing the one million served mark in 2009, continues to work toward this envisioned future.
From my perspective, the key to Scott’s approach is the transparency in his model. When people donate, 100% of the proceeds get mapped to an actual project. That’s one of the best call to actions you can present in an activism context.
Yesterday, CMO of Best Buy Barry Judge highlighted several key strategies that shaped his company’s success. Those that struck me:
- Retailers must evolve or die. We all can vividly remember when Circuit City was leading the market, and a company called Apple could barely keep the lights on.
- Iterate: Barry made it clear that Best Buy has tried hundreds of tactics and all of them deliver ROI – either through the monetary value of success or the learning value of failure.
- Invest and trust in your talent: Best Buy has been successful by trusting its employees to represent the company publicly. All of Best Buys employes, including top management, blog, tweet, etc. to engage the social mediasphere.
- Provide real time information and resources: A so called “twelpforce” gives employees tablets in store that they can use in real-time to answer customer questions. By providing technology for employees, customer experience becomes the focal point, which ultimately results in higher value creation.
I’m off to the next presentation. If you have questions or comments for me or any of the speakers, please post them below. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can with an answer!
Waterfall’s Senior Vice President, Matt Silk, is a featured speaker at the Mobile Marketing Association’s CEO & CEO Summit. He will be keeping us informed throughout the week with reactions and thoughts during this signature mobile event.
Just arrived to the beautiful Dominican Republic and Casa de Campo and all I can say is, wow. The MMA picked an incredible spot to serve as a backdrop for the week.
The ride from the airport set the tone in terms of the event’s attendees. In the hour long ride from Santo Domingo to La Romana alone, I caught up with 8 big time movers and shakers in the mobile industry. One particularly interesting conversation was with Alykhan Govani, formerly MX Telecom/OpenMarket, and now at Payfone. According to Aly, there are some exciting things going on at Payfone and he felt the same about what we’ve been up to at Waterfall.
Our first full group event was notable in that you could definitely feel mutual excitement from 150 executive about our 2.5 day journey. Throughout the evening, I reconnected with folks from what seemed like every corner of our industry, including Weather Channel, General Mills, Millennial Media, InMobi, Amobee, Medialets, Vibes, 3CiInteractive, HipCricket, Mozes, Mojiva.
The highlight of the night was a Kandelá performance, which gave us a taste of the Dominican Republic’s beautiful music and dance. After the performance, was great to finally meet Troy Brown in person. We’ve known each other for three years, but never actually got to meet face to face.
I’m really excited for day #1. I’ll be sending updates any opportunity I get to step away, so stay tuned.
Last week the Mobile Marketing Association announced its first annual CEO & CMO SUMMIT July 24-26, 2011 – a unique, invite only 2 1/2-day event where C-Level Executives across the mobile ecosystem will experience the best in both business insights and entertainment.
As you can see from the speaker list, our own Matt Silk has been invited and will be presenting a strategic roundtable session on messaging’s place in the marketing mix.
Stay tuned to our blog, Twitter, or Facebook to receive live updates before, during and after the event. It looks to be a thought-provoking and fascinating couple of days.
If you are going to be in attendance please shoot us a note as we would love to hear from you and meet up! If you have any thoughts to share about the future of messaging that you want Matt to include please comment below.
As we mentioned, Waterfall and Msgme headed out to last week’s Mobile Marketing Association Forum in New York. It was a great event with some great insight and we enjoyed meeting up with everyone who was in town.
Three quick thoughts on the Forum for those who weren’t able to attend:
- Though we were impressed by the quality of all the speakers this year, Doug Busk from Coca-Cola presented a particularly thought-provoking session. Coca-Cola, clearly a leader when it comes to marketing (and doing some amazing things in mobile), described several ways to be successful using cutting edge technologies such as mobile web, apps and augmented reality. And his overarching message was clear: SMS is still the best way to reach consumers via mobile. As Doug stated, “There is no more unifying format than SMS. If you want to reach consumers globally, SMS is the best way to do it.” You can read more details, including what we thought was a cool use case (SMS-enabled vending machine), here.
- We’ve been coming to the MMA forum for several years and were particularly impressed with the turnout. Tons of brands, agencies, vendors, thought leaders and folks interested in mobile came out to the conference. Mobile is clearly top of business mind and kudos to the MMA for coordinating the impressive attendance. This conference has grown up a lot, and you can tell from the number and quality of the sponsors the the MMA Forum is fast becoming the industry event for mobile.
As for what the MMA could do differently, we’d love to see some installed technologies that improved cell capabilities. It’s touch-and-go at any conference, but given the focus on mobile it would be great if dropped calls, delayed messages and slow loading web/apps could be addressed. In addition, we’d like to see the MMA Forum get more social. It seemed to us like people were interested in going out and relaxing with colleagues after the show, but didn’t have an outlet to do so.
- Though not surprising to us, it was still amazing to see so many QR Codes posted on signs, sponsor booths, printed materials – pretty much anywhere people could find a place for them. Being who we are, we tried a out a ton of them. Somewhat curiously, we didn’t find any codes that got beyond a basic QR-code-to-URL, which in our mind takes away from a code’s effectiveness. In our opinion, seemed like most QR Codes were slapped on rather than integrated into an outreach strategy.
That’s all from the MMA Forum. Next firm date on our schedule is the Engagement Expo powered by Loyalty 360, and we’re going to try to make it out to some of the Summer shows. Well keep you posted and let us know if you’re in town.
The Waterfall engineering team are excited to attend MongoSF tomorrow, May 24th. We’re beginning to leverage MongoDB for parts of our new platform and are looking forward to seeing how others have successfully used it in their solutions. Should be a lot of fun.
If you are attending yourself and see us there, don’t be shy, stop and say hi!
