Mobile Marketing heavyweights meet in Los Angeles

Greetings from Downtown Los Angeles and the Mobile Marketing Association! This morning sees the opening of the Mobile Marketing Forum, where leading figures from mobile brands, operators, content and entertainment providers, and media companies get together to share advances made during the year in the mobile market.

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) is a global organization that is focused on pushing mobile marketing. It does this through promoting development and channel standards, and pushing for sustainable profits instead of fast ones.  The forum was officially launched by Mike Wehrs, who thanked us for making the effort to travel – budgets being what they are these days. I’ve included a brief summation of his opening comments here:

It has been a busy year for the MMA. In April, it launched the US Conusmer Best Practices, combining four carrier playbooks. There were major updates to the Mobile Advertising Guidelines, as well as launches of new Premier and Affiliate Member programs, expansion into Brazil, and the launch of Local Councils in Europe and Asia. The MMA now has 7 research partners, and has re-launched the Research & Metrics Committee. And at 8pm this morning, the MMA launched what it considers the updated definition of Mobile Marketing (more on that below) – as well as announcing a Certified Mobile Marketer Program, which has launched today at the show. The Program is designed to train someone to have all the skills (both technical and advertising) needed to work as a mobile marketer.

We also saw the AdMob acquisition – this was Google’s third largest purchase ever, and this is a validation of the mobile marketing proposition. It’s going to be the most exciting year yet in mobile marketing… it won’t just be an incremental step up from 2009, it will be an explosive year for mobile marketing.

For those who are interested, the new definition of Mobile Marketing (according to the MMA) is: Mobile Marketing is a set of practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network.