Last week the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) held its European conference in Barcelona, Spain. The event was well attended, with representatives from mobile operators, agencies, technology providers and brands.

Jim Cook from MobiAD moderated a panel of mobile operators, including representatives from Vodafone (Richard Saggers), Blyk (Leif Fagelstedt), Telenor (Anne Lise Katle), Orange (Steve Ricketts), and Turkcell (Melis Turkmen). Some of the key points brought out by the operators at the show:

• Mobile should not be viewed as just a better performing version of internet advertising. Comparisons which just show the improved click through rates on mobile miss the point that there are additional powerful features that can be used on mobile. And it should not be budgeted within a campaign as some percentage of the online spend.

• Ensuring the “Relevance” of advertising is a key concern for all operators. An ad that is relevant – whether because of demographics, location, time of day, customer interests – can be viewed as content, perhaps even valuable content. Ads that fail the ‘relevancy’ test may be viewed as spam and damage the user experience and eventually the operator’s brand reputation.

• Opt-in databases can be a powerful tool. Turkcell has an opt-in database of over 4 million subscribers that it makes available for advertising. This is very effective for advertisers such as banks, as it can greatly reduce their cost of customer acquisition. Blyk’s entire business is built upon an opt-in database, as every Blyk subscriber has agreed to received 6 ads per day in return for the free SMS messages and voice minutes.

• Providing a larger advertising reach is a key goal for many operators. One of the keys to this will be the development of standards in areas such as ad formats, measurement data, and business terms. Operators are working to provide consolidated advertising inventory across operators within a country, as well as across countries for a single operator.

• Different regions have very different market situations to deal with. For example, most operators have not made any customer profile information available outside their own network. However in Norway, the operators can already provide some customer profile information to their business partners to enable them to target advertising. If anyone abuses this, Telenor just shuts them down. They have also adopted relatively consistent business pricing terms and conditions to make buying of advertisements a less fragmented activity.

In another session, Richard Saggers of Vodafone, who is also the head of MMA Europe, spoke in depth about Vodafone’s plans for mobile advertising. He explained that their top 5 internal priorities include:

• developing cross operator ad inventory
• developing standardized ad formats
• developing effective metrics and proofpoints
• developing an integrated planning tool for media planners
• education and evangelizing the brands and agencies

The next Mobile Marketing Forum is November 14 in Los Angeles, California, followed on by an event in Hong Kong on December 6.