Mobile Monday Barcelona

Last Night, was the launch of the Barcelona chapter of Mobile Monday Barcelona co-founded and organized by the unique Rudy de Waele. MobileMonday CEO Jari Tammisto introduced the concept of the event. Jari has been in the mobile industry (managerial position at the finnish national operator) for a long time and admitted he did all the mistakes that could have been done, including believing in pagers as main device for communication and investing in city-wide networks thinking GSM would fail.

The evening’s topic was about mobile marketing & advertising.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates Director of Yahoo! Research Barcelona presented the open research and their vision called FUSE (for Find, Use, Share, and Expand), that is using search to fuse a myriad of services and applications, all of which center on knowledge and its application. Yahoo! bases its search strategy on the Wisdom of the Crowd, by delivering relevant content based on links, tags and search queries. However one challenge is to have people tagging content. On of their experiment is called ESP Game, a game in which players compete to tag images and therefore introduce knowledge while playing. Then Ricardo mentioned the specificities of mobile search: queries have more variaty, less time is spent on the results and (surprisingly to me) more words are used in the query.

Russell Buckley (MobHappy and AdMob) drew on the lessons of 6 years of Mobile advertising, he looked at successes and failures. His global messages is that “Mobile Advertising works if done correctly”. Russell went on analyzing the failures of the push-based mobile marketing/advertising model, the so-called “Starbucks myth” (i.e. Bluetooth messages generated when people pass nearby a coffee place). Indeed, the mobile industry has yet not really started finding relevant ways to use proximity and space as triggers for interaction. Somehow in response to that Ana Caralt, CEO of McCann Interactive Spain, described a successful advertisement campaign in which a billboard invited people to connect to it via Bluetooth to download content. I tend to believe that “ubiquitous companies” have the opportunity to engage people to interact using their infrastructures.

Relation to my thesis: Russell Buckley’s talk was very relevant in highlighting the difficult balance between pervasiveness and intrusiveness (e.g. being present and not annoying, finding the right timing, the right added-value and the right way to interact) mobile marketing campaigns must deal with. Same goes with the design of ubiquitous environments