What's working, what's not, and what's next.
The final session at Heroes Of The Mobile Screen focuses on mobile marketing - what's happening now and where it's going. And specifically what's working well.
First up is Douglas McDonald from Creston, who's asked for his 'top three' brand heroes who've done good mobile marketing campaigns.
He says Coca-Cola is the first one. "They are an inclusive mobile marketer. They will look at what they want to achieve across the board, and will use the mobile marketing technologies to make sure that everyone they can communicate with can engage with the brand."
Second is Bird's Eye, who he says also use the right technologies to talk to their specific audience. And finally, Walker's, who he says use all the available ways of communicating, not just mobile - "they use every single trick in the book".
Second up is Mark Waechter of MWC.mobi, who chooses BMW as his first mobile marketing hero - he thinks they "live and breathe mobile", trying out new technologies like QR codes ahead of their rivals, not to mention launching apps and their own mobile TV channel.
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Second is Lufthansa - "one of the few top-tier mobile airlines who dived into mobile commerce and took mobile as a consumer channel". And third is Deutsche Post, the German post office, which was a late starter in mobile.
Finally, George Nimeh from Iris Digital picks Nike as his first choice, for "creating a value exchange" with their customers through mobile applications. Things like Nike+ aren't just useful, but they're enjoyable too.
His second choice is Spotify. "The thing that impressed me the most was they convinced Apple to forego almost a monopolistic platform of their own and let people download Spotify onto the iPhone. That's a brilliant achievement."
And third is the New York Times, who he says has always been "extraordinarily open to new platforms and experimentation".
Finally, Carolyn Hoffman from Microsoft who cites three events rather than three companies. One is Sony Ericsson and NeoMedia's barcode technology announcement earlier this week. "Finally we'll start to see something exciting happening in the world of mobile coupons".
Second is O2's announcement of location-based personalised SMS ads. And third is today's announcement of Rummble launching for Windows Mobile. Yes, a plug. Although in fairness, some of those other choices from her fellow panellists were campaigns their companies had worked on.
No overall theme though, which surprises moderator Paul Berney from the Mobile Marketing Association. He starts with McDonald's talk about integration.
"Mobile doesn't work unless it's being promoted through other channels basically," he says. "What I'm interested in is giving people the choice to interact with brands in the way they want to do that." Posters, TV ads, Facebook or mobile. "A proper integrated campaign will use mobile probably as a hub for all the different interactions," he says.
Over to Waechter, whose three heroes all looked at 'the customer journey and the touchpoints'. How? He talks about Lufthansa, and the way it uses mobile along the whole list of ways they interact with customers - from booking tickets to feedback once their flight is over.
Nimeh now, who says that "if 2009 has taught us anything, you have to be able to prove some form of value back to the organisation" when running a marketing campaign.
And now Hoffman. What links the three things she mentioned? "The number one thing is user choice and user control," she says. She liked the O2 announcement because there were no carrots attached - it wasn't 'sign up and get free stuff so we can bombard you'. The value in signing up was the content itself.
So what will work in the next 6-9 months? Nimeh promises "unbelievable experiences", citing the Wikitude augmented reality browser as one example. "It's a small step in what will be a very rich experience in much more location-aware stuff. Foursquare is the same."
McDonald next: More personalisation and more context. And Hoffman agrees with Nimeh on location-awareness being important - including much more basic offers. "Twitter has got people saying 'gosh, plain text can be very effective, and if you can layer that with location..."
Questions from the audience: someone mentions Pepsi's QR code - will they take off in the UK, or be surpassed by NFC or something else? McDonald says he understands the response was very very low ("point zero zero zero zero one percent"). "Why not text Pepsi to a shortcode and get a much better response? It's about technology rather than the real world."
Another question: how do we define a successful mobile campaign? How do you measure it?
"Money" says chair Paul Berney, from the MMA. And that's about it.
