MMA EMEA Announces New Appointments to UK Board of Directors

The MMA is pleased to announce the appointment of new industry leaders to the MMA UK Board of Directors, as well as renewals of a number of members for another term. The new board members will serve a one-year term beginning immediately.

The growing number of marketers and agencies on the UK board aligns directly with the MMA’s recently announced marketer first and innovation-focused mission. We are focused on building mobile knowledge, know-how, inspiration and confidence throughout our membership and across the UK and EMEA region. View full  press release 

The new and re-elected UK board members include:

• Stephen Upstone, Founder & CEO, LoopMe (Chair)
• Claire Valoti, Head of Agency Relations UK, Facebook (Vice Chair)
• Adrian McDonald, VP International Bus Dev & Strategy, Widespace
• Alex Klose, Head of Marketing, IMImobile
• Britta Anderson, Senior Manager Digital Marketing EU, Coca-Cola Enterprises
• Chris Minas, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Nimbletank
• George Dixon, Head of Mobile, Mediacom
• James Collier, Managing Director EMEA, AdTruth
• James Temple, VP, MD Executive Creative Director, R/GA London
• Jide Sobo, Head of Mobile, MEC
• Matt Brocklehurst, Product Marketing, Mobile Advertising, Google
• Mick Rigby, CEO, Yodel Mobile
• Nigel Clarkson, Commercial Director, Weve
• Pratick Thakrar, Managing Director, Inspired Mobile
• Paul O’Grady, Senior Communications Planning Manager, Unilever
• Simon Birkenhead, CEO, Axonix
• Victor Malachard, CEO and Co-Founder, byyd Tech (Adfonic)

I’d like to thank all our board members in advance and look forward to working together to further the MMA mission and deliver increased member value.

For further information please contact:

Sally Harvey 

Director of Membership Strategy, EMEA MMA 

Sending the Right Signals: Beacons

Robert Haslam, PR Manager at Mubaloo Limited & MiBeacons

It’s been a year now since beacons rose to prominence in the mobile space, following Apple’s system wide support for iBeacons in iOS 7. With Google bringing deeper BLE support with Android L, the role of beacons for connecting real world objects with mobile devices will only grow.

Beacons on Android

Already, the majority of trials or implementations have focused on the retail sector, delivering marketing messages to consumers, when they are in the right proximity of objects. For example, inMarket’s push notifications have led to interactions with advertised products increase by 19x and app usage increase by 16.5x. Whilst this is encouraging, there is a danger that consumers will grow tired of constant notifications, unless there is enough of a value exchange.

The Minority Effect

Anyone who has seen the Minority Report will be familiar with a world where consumers receive targeted adverts, based on exactly who they are. What they will have also is the amount of noise that comes with constant alerts.

Noise has always been an issue when it comes to advertising. We have become very good at tuning out adverts or marketing, which is part of the reason shiny new channels tend to perform well. People are curious creatures, the more familiar we become with a certain medium, the more we tune it out until something new comes along.

Augmented Shopping: Set to Transform Retail Sooner Than You Think

Peggy Anne Salz, founder of MobileGroove

It was less than a year ago that the MMA UK published Mobile: The Great Connector, a comprehensive publication that revealed how many verticals, including retail, were harnessing mobile to bridge the digital and physical ‘worlds’ to drive conversions and boost customer loyalty.

Fast forward, and we are witnessing the advance of projects and pilots aimed to ‘blend’ these worlds together to make shopping immersive and — at the same time — enable bricks-and-mortar retailers to (re)gain control of the in-store environment in order to optimize, personalize and monetize the advice and advertising they deliver shoppers on their mobile devices.

The recent Google I/O Developer Conference provided us a glimpse into this not-so-distant future. I’m talking here about the tie-up between Google’s Project Tango and aisle411, a company specializing in indoor mapping, to make in-store shopping with mobile devices much more immersive and rewarding for consumer.

A review of their combined solutions strengths shows why we can expect this vision is set to become reality much sooner than we think.

• Google’s Project Tango is a multi-partner effort that has produced a disruptive new technology for creating 3D maps of indoor spaces with the ability to show a user’s precise location and orientation within centimeters of accuracy.

• aisle411 has a long track record and powers over 12,500 searchable store maps for retailers including Walgreens, Home Depot and Marsh. Its indoor/in-store mobile marketing platform technology allows it to collect, organize, and monetize retailers’ product inventory location data, and optimize this information for display and delivery via the retailer’s mobile app.

The Mobile Lion’s roar is challenging creative thinkers

Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director of Mobile Marketing Association APAC

Between awards, seminars and the parties, life at Cannes can be very busy for the entire week of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The sacrifice of sleep, nonetheless, is a small price to pay for the global learning and enriching ideas that the platform offers.

The Mobile Lions category, now in its third year, turned out to be quite a discussed and debated category this year. One key question that the trends across categories throw up is whether it is wise to constraint mobile to a single category. Reason being, mobile is playing a very meaningful role in the whole aspect of advertising and marketing. Most winning campaigns have a strong mobile element to them. I am near certain that the arguments there, on both sides, will continue for a while, which will only make the evolution of this category even more fascinating to observe.

For me, every conversation, session and every winning work brings its own learnings. Amongst that, the one thought that surfaces repeatedly, is that mobile has moved beyond a technology driven medium to a channel that is evoking and speaking to human emotions. This only reflects the fact that mobile is an intrinsic part of an individual, and that the successful creative ideas are addressing that human aspect, touching human emotions with the device.

The other unmissable factor seen in the Gold and Silver campaigns is mobile driving and ‘connecting in the moment’. The ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’ campaign was an excellent example of fulfilling a human need to be entertained and to consume content in a convenient form. Works like Anzac Appeal, Nivea Sun Kids and AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research) touched upon various elements of being human – whether it is protection, women’s safety, social cause and so on. There was once a time when the creative fraternity saw TV making the emotional connect as it had the audio visual elements; mobile is doing the same but with so much more – it is not just making the emotional connect in the moment but is reflecting how consumers are using technology to assist them in personal life and needs.