In early July, the Mobile Marketing Association released a real page-turner (insert sarcasm here), a global code of conduct designed to address “specific challenges that marketers face within the mobile channel.”
Among the obstacles of growing importance to marketers are the technical and cultural challenges that mobile marketers encounter when using the mobile channel to reach consumers beyond the United States.
It shouldn’t take an MMA report, however, to validate what we already know almost universally to be true, that in only a few short years we will see significant growth in international mobile marketing. And for now, even with the technology already in place, we are still further behind than we should be as advertisers with a world of markets awaiting us. What’s the holdup? Our own apprehensions.
Naturally, a major challenge on the international mobile landscape is the lack of global standards and interoperability between carriers and platforms. Yet the fact that there are no universal standards results in having to operate at a rudimentary level, which is actually the simplest thing any mobile marketer can possibly do.
The skittishness of mobile marketers in the international arena is also giving greater awareness to an even bigger issue confronting the mobile marketing industry as a whole – the widespread misperception that mobile marketing campaigns have to be complicated.
Whenever I strike up a discussion (and eventually a debate) with my friends and associates in the mobile marketing business, I get drastically mixed results. Some argue that mobile marketing is more complicated than advertisers realize. Others, including myself, believe that it is only as complicated as we make it or need it to be.
Your thoughts please.
