BarCamp in focus on the mobile industry
The first Mobile BarCamp in Germany was located in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Dresden and after a big round of introductions we got the session proposals for the first day. The first session I visited was hosted by Willi Schroll (Strategic Labs i.G.) about Mobile Communities – Future Trends and Challenges. Willi spoke about micro blogging a al twitter and ‚moss‘ web (mobile social semantic web) with the question if the people wish at all an ubiquitous sociality and a total transparency of your life. There are sometimes design dilemmas in the development of social application like location; e.g. if I stop the system to track my location for two hours, then I cause a broad interpretation in my social environment. The people ask them self, what is Maciej doing? Where is he? Who is he meeting? Why he wants to be invisible? So we had an interesting discussion around topics about who is defining any kind of social rules in our social environment and are we really ready to give up our privacy?
Michael Osei-Ampadu (Smaato Inc.) made the second session. It was a spontaneous presentation about smaato :o). I asked him what he thinks about the German market, because it seems to be very ’special‘. Interesting to hear was that Michael things that ‚mobile advertisement sucks‘, but I thing I missed the point of this statement. But we also discussed the initial hesitations by the advertising industry in Germany. Antonia Neubauer (YOC AG) said that the German market is very extensive customer counseling, but there are already big no-web brands spending a lot of money for mobile advertisement, even in the middle of the worldwide crises. Marc O. Schmöger (7P Consulting GmbH) added that today the value in the commercials (e.g. sales discount) is missing. You should include the consumer more in the preparation of your marketing campaign and listen what they really want on their cell phone.
The third session was more a discussion round hosted by Lutz Lengemann (freenet GmbH) about Mobile Web versus Mobile Applications. The over 30 participators addressed a lot of different aspects like Usability, Costs, Value and Reach. There is no clear answer which of the both will dominate, but there are more arguments in favor for mobile web services. But at the end everything seems to be clear; right now we have the same development history like we had it in the PC world with the internet. So it seems that we at Peperoni are still on the right way focusing only on mobile web services and not developing mobile apps.
After the lunch break I visited the Vodafone session about Mobile mobile Widgets & Platform Independent Apps (Vodafone Group Services GmbH) hosted by Daniel Herzog and Markus Kucborski. It was interesting, but more like a sales pitch about their mobile widget activities. Afterwards I listen to a session about monetization of mobile sites and widgets, with the focus on affiliate marketing. But also in informal talks at the event I had some exchange of ideas around Mobile Learning with e.g. Mostafa Akbari (RWTH Aachen) and about Social Media Monitoring with e.g. Hannes Carl Meyer (MIMBlog). More about the first Mobile BarCamp in Dresden to find in the blog of Hannes, blog of Tobias and a blog post by Dirk.
Hi,
I think I did not make my point clear enough in my session. The point of my intentionally provoking statement was that in the current mobile advertising market the usage of the mobile channel is way below it’s potential.
Talking about the mass market we see today tons of ‚mobile content‘ ads at low prices. This is not good for me as a user, not good for the publisher (low prices) and not good for the big brands because they mostly keep out of the game (exceptions prove the rule).
When I think about the future of advertising two things come to my mind: a) Relevance and b) Dialog. The mobile channel is the predestinated channel to fulfill both of those requirements plus it’s one of the few channels to reach certain target groups. Today I hardly see the possibilities being used. It’s like picking up the kids from kindergarten with your ferrari. We need to get mobile advertising to the racing track.
In order to get things moving mobile needs to be better understood by brands and agencie’s. We need good creative campaign’s in order to get results and acceptance.
Michael