mesh conference, Author at mesh

Oct 24

meshmarketing speaker spotlight: Jennifer Lum

By mesh conference meshmarketing

In the last blog post, we talked about a panel put together to provide brands and marketers with some insight into how to capitalize on the fast-growing mobile market.

To provide some context about the mobile market and the panel, I talked with Jennifer Lum, a Canadian, who started Adelphic Mobile, a marketing platform that has attracted 250 million unique visitors and more than six billion pageviews since its launched a year ago.

Can you provide some more info about Adelphia?

We are working on mobile advertising model that we believe will unlock value in the mobile advertising market. What is probably known is that consumption rates of mobile media are growing but the mobile ad spend is not growing at the same rate. There is something blocking it. Mobile media isn’t currently target-able in a way that marketers are accustomed to buying through other digital channels. Right now, a lot of mobile inventory is described by devices, carriers and networks. Marketers are not thinking I will buy an iPhone 4s on Rogers or an Android device on Telus. They are thinking “I am Coke, and for this campaign, I want to target males of this demo.” If you have an iPhone4, that’s nice but they are naturally thinking of ads along those lines. We are bringing audience based advertising to mobile which we think will pair buyers and sellers.

Have brands and advertisers got their head around mobile yet?

I think the mature brands and agencies have moved past the point of testing. They have been planning and budgeting for a couple years in mobile but there are so many more players and budgets in the market that aren’t yet truly engaged in mobile. We want to help make it easier to make it easier for brand to connect with people in mobile. There is no lack of inventory or interest on behalf of brands, we have to raise confidence for advertisers and deliver good ROI and a lot of insightful data.

What are mobile ad formats?

There are a number of companies doing a good job pushing mobile rich media into the market, and some are full-page interstitial and some are banners that expand. The adoption rate for those kinds of campaigns is starting to pick up but less than 15% of the media being delivered is rich media.

What about Facebook and its mobile challenges?

It is really interesting to see the small twist in their mobile monetization strategy. Some of the complexity comes into play with them because they are unwilling to support the standard display unit in mobile. They are heavily focused on helping to drive mobile app installs. They are considering some of the data plays but they can’t tap into the massive audience they have and monetize traditional display. What is the right ad unit to help them start monetizing that data?

Oct 22

Love0

How do Marketers Leverage Mobile?

By mesh conference meshmarketing

There are now more than one billion – yes, billion – smartphone users. It’s a meta-market but brands, marketers and advertisers have yet to really figure out how to turn all those users into revenue.

It’s certainly not for a lack of trying. The mobile marketplace includes advertising, e-commerce, search, location-based services (LBS) and content. While advertising has been making modest inroads, it is far from clear whether it has huge potential.

The uncertainly about the mobile market is one of the reasons we wanted to do a panel at meshmarketing. It brings together a variety of people who can offer different perspectives – Jason Chaney is advertising strategist, Jennifer Lum runs Adelphic, a mobile advertising network, Amar Narain is director of IT with Pizza Pizza, which has launched successful mobile apps, and Naeem Lakhani is the COO with BNotions, a mobile developer.

It will be interesting to see what kind of insight and direction the panelists can offer brands and marketers looking to take advantage of the fast-growing mobile market in a way that drives engagement, sales and ROI. To many brands, mobile is proving to be irresistible but getting some sense of what to do is one of their key needs.

Oct 19

Love0

meshmarketing speaker spotlight: David Usher

By mesh conference meshmarketing

meshmarketing David Usher is not only a popular musician but an entrepreneur and savvy user of social media. We’re excited David will be our closing keynote speaker at meshmarketing. With a hectic schedule in the wake of his album, Last Day on Earth, I got a chance to speak with David about his keynote.

What’s the theme of your presentation?

It really talks how to re-engage creativity. A lot of it is about the ideas as we go through life, and how curiosity tends to get worn down. The beginning point is remembering you’re a curious being. It goes through the basic elements of the creative process. What are the steps? Creativity is a learnable, repeatable and transferrable process. Anyone can learn to be more creative. Once you learn the process of creativity, you can use the process over and over in many different areas and disciplines in your life.

How does this reflect your personal experiences?

Right now, what I have found in my own life and everyone surrounding me is the world is in transition and personal cycles and business cycles are so much faster. It not just about being more creative to make better products and services, but being creative because you have to adopt an attitude of change. You are in a constant state of motion and change, and that’s the new normal for everyone whereas before we could be the best locally and that was fine. Now, we are competing on a global scale so we need to open up and branch out.

What’s new in your world these days?

The newest thing is I have finished building and launching is Artists for Amnesty. Artists give us songs and we ask their fans to help spread the world about social justice. We are in the beta phase. We launched a couple weeks ago. I’m also writing for the Huffington Post and working on a TV show.

Tickets for meshmarketing are on sale for $299, while student tickets are $49.