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.
