The Mobile Upfront Conference: An Overview

A crowd of nearly 500 representatives from agencies, publishers, and technology vendors gathered on Tuesday, March 16th down in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for the first annual Mobile Upfront Conference, hosted by Jumptap. The day and the venue were both jam-packed, with discussions from the people out there on the front lines executing mobile advertising campaigns. If you want a full overview of the conference, you might want to read through the tweetstream, but I'll summarize some key takeaways here. Mobile BRAND advertising is still in a testing and trial mode but all major brands are incorporating some form of mobile advertising

Isobar recommends that all their advertisers start with approximately a $50K ad spend in mobile to experiment, test and measure. They also recommend that everyone commission a brand study to help judge effectiveness. Mobile advertising spend from brands will continue to grow
Tara Moss from Isobar stated that mobile is approximately 5-10% of the mobile ad spend now, but expects it to represent 40% of the online spend in a few years, and R/GA feels that while mobile ad budgets have been slow to develop, they will be quicker to grow than what we saw in the early days of online. Mobile advertising is effective

While measurement is a concern for all the panelists throughout the day, what they have measured so far has been an unprecedented success with three to four times the results of online. Measurements vary depending on campaign goals (acquisition, retention, brand awareness, commerce, foot traffic, etc) so measuring both engagement and conversion across all campaigns is critical. John Hadl from Brand in Hand described how he has an assistant dedicated to compiling reports from various ad server and ad networks -- clearly that problem needs to be solved for mobile advertising to scale (and Crisp Wireless has some solutions for this.) Marriott has actually had amazing success with revenue driven from their mobile site exceeding that from individual country sites.