Tuesday: Golden Gekko campaigns nominated for 3 awards at the Global MMA Awards

Monday: Golden Gekko nominated for 3 awards at the Global MMA

New York; London, UK; Singapore and Sao Paulo, 28 October 2008 — The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) (www.mmaglobal.com), which globally promotes the development and sustainability of mobile marketing, today announced the finalists for the MMA’s Fourth Annual Global Mobile Marketing Awards which honors the companies who are successfully utilizing and leading the adoption of the mobile channel for marketing purposes. The awards will be presented at the Annual Global Awards dinner and ceremony on November 13 in San Diego, concluding the MMA’s Mobile Marketing Forum (www.mobilemarketingforum.com).

Golden Gekko is happy to announce that the following campaigns by us have been chosen as MMA award finalists:

Absolut Drinks in your mobile, Best use of Mobile Marketing Branding in EMEA
Lynx Get In There mobile tools, Best use of Mobile Marketing Branding in EMEA
Cippis Trump Selecta!, Best use of Mobile Marketing Branding in EMEA

Thursday: Thumbs down of the week – Companies presenting Bluetooth as mobile marketing

Bluetooth is a great technology and can be used for distribution of fantastic mobile marketing campaigns and services but it's not a standalone mobile marketing solution. The technology should be presented as one technology among many distribution alternatives and user very carefully.

I don't want to point out anyone specifically but although there are some very serious players out there, many are not and they think it’s ok to spam people walking by as long as they hit their numbers. During the last couple of weeks I've been hit my messages in shopping malls, airports, while walking by stores in the high street, in the cinema and various other places and I'm starting to get annoyed. This might be ok in the short term but in the longer term this will give mobile marketing a bad reputation and the industry cannot afford this if we want to be credible.

When you plan to use proximity marketing the next time think of every person walking by as your dearest friend and treat them that way! No more spamming please!

Wednesday: We love campaign of the week - Kraft Foods 3in1 and 2in1 for Jacobs Soluble Mixes

A great 360° campaign where TV-Spots, print ads, mobile ads and online all lead to a mobile site or a SMS response where customers could leave their address to get a product sample. What we liked about it is
• great execution in terms of clear objectives
• simplicity of the message
• use of cross-media channels for greatest effectiveness

The campaign clearly showed the commercial benefits of a mass market mobile marketing campaign that resulted in over 450.000 requests for samples from people that actually wanted to try the Jacobs Soluble products. Well done!

Tuesday: New mobile technology pick of the week – site.mobi

This is not a new service but it’s definitely worth reminding people of. The .mobi organisation provides this great service powered by mobiSiteGalore as a free online tool that helps you create your very own mobile website including all kinds of functionality as well as monetisation opportunities. The service provides

• A great creation and editing tool with templates, formatting of graphics and text exactly as you want it and the ability to add audio and video
• Mobile websites that are work on almost any mobile phone
• Features such as click-to-call, site search, hit counter and search engine optimisation
• Monetisation functionally including banner adverts and integration with Bango
• A test of your mobile websites readiness
• And much more

Although it’s great for creating your first mobile websites this is not a solution for developers or professional sites. The main cons of the service are that it does not have a content management system and that the templates do not allow for much freedom in terms of design.

Also make sure that you have access to a FTP account before you start because otherwise you have nowhere to publish your completed mobile website. Good luck and please send us the results!

Try out the service on http://site.mobi

Monday: Mobile service pick of the week – Visibility Mobile

Finally a search engine that will only give you search results of sites that are optimised for mobile. After years of searching I bumped into the founder (Bena Roberts) in Budapest at the Mobile Marketing Forum and now I’m happy. Even on a big screen like the iPhone or Nokia N95 the browsing experience of normal websites is very clunky and with unreliable speeds on 3G networks it can take forever to download a normal web page. Try searching for a mobile game or ringtone on Google Mobile. Last time I searched for games I ended up on a web page with flash games that don’t work on my mobile and then on a ringtone page on the web where I could input my phone number which then directed me to a WAP-page which was 3 extra steps rather than just giving me a mobile ringtones page.

The most popular web sites accessed from the mobile (BBC, Facebook, Yahoo, etc) all have a mobile optimised version and we think this will be a necessity for at least another 5 years. Visibility Mobile helps people find content and information through mobile optimised websites. It may take a while for the service to take off but when it does it will be huge!

See http://www.visibilitymobile.com for more information

Golden Gekko in the news this week

This weeks news in the media about Golden Gekko


Golden Gekko nominated as top mobile entertainment company in Sweden by the Magazine Mobil. Read more here.

Famous blogger, chairman of the MMA and Managing Director of Admob in Europe talks about Golden Gekko's creative mobile marketing campaigns on his blog Mohappy.

MoGo News, Bena Roberts interviewed Golden Gekko at the MMA in Budapest. Read more at MoGoNews

Friday: Paris Autumn

This has absolutely nothing to do with mobile...

Sometimes you need a weekend getaway and we choose Paris for a weekend of great food and wine, culture, meeting new people and as the finale watching D’ Arc horse races on the Sunday. It turned into a fantastic weekend in an amazingly beautiful city with colourful autumn leaves, lots of great encounters with wonderful Parisians and a few interesting surprises. I can’t wait to go back again!

Mobile Marketing Association Forum in Budapest 7-8 October – Thumbs up!

I went to the conference this time with somewhat low expectations in terms of participants, speakers and new insights and learning’s. Generally the speakers at conferences of this kind tell you what you already know and spend most of the time selling a product that the other participants don’t care too much about. Despite a bit of this I came back considerably richer in terms of knowledge, experience and new contacts.

Here are a couple of insights from the conference

• 2008 is not the big year of mobile marketing and we doubt that even 2009 will be based on the expectations expressed by the industry but maybe the expectations are set too high
• Major brands are experiencing true success stories both in terms of ROI and reach that makes mobile marketing worthwhile for dedicated budgets going forward and should result in healthy growth but do the media planners buy in to this yet?
• The value chain is a mess and will continue to be a mess until media planners and creative agencies take a serious role in integrating mobile in the overall marketing mix
• Brands, mobile operators and technology companies have very little in common and I wonder if joining them up might do more bad than good – would a brand manager go to a conference with web content management and Internet Service Providers?
• The citizens of this world (an expression borrowed Jonathan MacDonald at Ogilvy) will have the last say in whether marketing on the mobile is a success or not – we can just do our best to make them happy by delivering great value, relevancy and an enjoyable experience

I also had the opportunity to speak at the conference and present our appeal for more creative mobile marketing. You can find the presentation here.

A big thank you to the MMA for organising this great event and to the great speakers and participants. I already look forward to the next one!