Earlier this week I spoke about mobile advertising, the Apple iPhone, weblogs and camera phones at the Center for Sales Strategy’s (CSS) “Marketing Technology Summit” in Minneapolis.
CSS offers consulting services, conferences and workshops to sales people in the media — print, radio and television.
I was on a panel moderated by Phil Leigh, a long-time technology analyst, who now runs Inside Digital Media where he posts lots of interesting audio and video podcasts of technology executives (see below). I first met Phil more than 20 years ago when I was the editor/publisher of the magazine and newsletter of the first trade association in the United States for the independent providers of paging and mobile telephone (then called “radiotelephone”) services.
First detailed mobile research report
Phil was an analyst at Reinheimer Nordberg where he wrote in the early 1980s what is probably the first detailed analyst’s report about the opportunities in the paging and mobile telephone businesses.
(At the association — then called Telocator Network of America and later called the Personal Communications Industry Association) I spent a lot of time talking to analysts and the press, especially when cellular was under discussion — but not yet implemented.
Although the phone companies were involved in mobile communications, the driving force at that time were the independent providers — called radio common carriers — whose main business was mobile. For the phone companies, mobile communications was more of a rounding error. The phone companies didn’t get interested until cellular, and I was around from the very beginning.
Phil was nice enough to interview me via phone, using WebEx, a few days before my CSS presentation and he’s going to be posting that interview — probably in two parts — in a little while. Update: Phil just posted the first part.
My presentation
During Phil’s panel I discussed — to the audience of media sales executives — the value of mobile advertising. I also discussed why the iPhone could be so useful from an editorial and, most importantly to the audience, an advertising sales standpoint.
I also discussed the value of weblogs — with a twist. I suggested audience look at the existing weblogs and consider asking some of those bloggers to write for their newspapers and radio and TV stations.
Much of what I discussed will be in the pre-show interview I did with Phil. (In late June Phil conducted an audio podcast with me about different mobile topics, uincluding the ramifications of the iPhone and George Gilder’s “teleputer.”)
Where are the laptops?
One last point: Although the hotel (wonderful place – 42” plasma TV, smaller TV in bathroom, five-head shower, great downtown location; highly recommended) offered WiFi in the conference room, you had to pay for it ($13 a day, I think) and CSS didn’t subsidize the cost.
Unlike at virtually all the wireless/computer conferences I attend, at the “Marketing Technology Summit” almost none of the attendees were using a laptop (see BlackBerry 8300 “Curve” camera phone photo above).
As a big fan of WiFi at conferences, I think CSS should consider paying for WiFi use so it’s free to attendees and include information on their Web site that would be useful before and during the conference. I’ve conducted a few tutorials/workshops about using WiFi at conferences and the benefits far, far outweigh the disadvantages.
Using the tools
Moreover, the attendees at the Summit are all very, very interested — and many of them very apprehensive — about how the Internet is affecting advertising sales. It seems to me that these sales executives should be using and viewing the technologies and services — such as weblogs, social networks, Web sites — about which they are concerned — during the conference.
They should be checking out the Web sites mentioned by the speakers, checking the speakers’ credentials and looking at any resources CSS could upload in anticipation of the event.
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