MPlanet's Digital Marketing Labs - Mobile Marketing Session

Today kicked off day 1 of Mplanet here in Orlando, FL. As I mentioned before I am one of 12 bloggers that were invited to hang out at the conference, take notes and meet some of the industry's top players. Today was the pre-conference and the Digital Marketing Labs. They were a series of sessions dealing with new media and how we are transforming to a digital world.

No lie, some of the sessions were a little basic, but with good measure. By a show of hands in each of the rooms, many of the marketers and brands had not conducted full scale social media campaigns even though they had heard of many of the tools (Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc).

My favorite session of the day was Russell Buckley's Mobile Marketing session. Russell is the head of the Mobile Marketing Association and also co-signs for AdMob, one of the largest players in mobile advertising, displaying billions of impressions every month on handheld's worldwide.

This subject came at an opportune time for us at Endagon as we have just partnered with an iPhone dev team and a mobile and SMS crew. So needless to say, these things are taking up prime real estate in the ol brain of mine.

Some quick facts from Russell's session:

• Push technology (SMS, coupons, etc) is a push medium. The user is passive, has to opt-in and there is a SPAM element to the blasts.
• The pull version are mobile sites and applications, where the user is actively participating. There is a prompt for action, whether its watching a video, click to call, mobile ordering or downloads.
• BMW ran an SMS campaign with 120,000 texts. There was a 30% response, $60,000 in costs and $45 million in direct sales!
• Land Rover ran a mobile site targeting males 34-55. They had 45,000 video views, 5,000 dealer lookups and 1,000 click to calls.
• Smart phones serve up 33% of all mobile ads served. This number is growing quickly.
• 30 million people have fixed data plans in the U.S.
• The iPhone serves up the most impressions of mobile ads. The iPod Touch is number 2!
• Food and restaurants have a 29% uplift on mobiles vs. PC's for responses (for more on Hospitality, New Media and Gen-Y, check out our free Whitepaper)

Goodbye to day 1, looking forward to the big sessions tomorrow. I will be doing a video interview with Mary from McDonalds tomorrow on Gen-Y marketing, so if you have any questions for me to ask, act fast!

-Greg Rollett