The media director's panel highlights a split in mobile media between high and low-end campaigns, with not much in-between. At the high end, it might be an iPhone app that's expensive to build and may or may not take off, and at the other extreme, SMS campaigns integrated with traditional media, whether TV or a billboard featuring shortcode for getting more information about a promotion. In all the complexity and confusion surrounding mobile advertising, that's a pretty clear choice.

Zenith Media's K-Yun Steele thinks it's the best of times, but also the worst of times where client mobile marketing strategies are concerned. He cited an anonymous "fashion" client as a worst of times scenario, noting that the client wanted to use mobile for a fahsion retail marketing effort, but hadn't thought out the implications, had no customer database to target them mobilely, and had a weak CRM system. In the end Steele suggested the try retailing ring tones vs. fashion products. Actually, that's what his best of times scenario client, Puma, did during the Beijing Olympics. …

There's one thing we all perhaps intuitively know about mobile devices that can't quite be measured (until there is a way to use the device's camera to gauge how far the user is holding it from his face): real engagement. You know the way the typical person checks his email or watches video on a phoneâ€"as pantomimed by Joy Liuzzo of Insight Express from the stage at OMMA Mobile so well this morningâ€"holding the phone six to ten inches from his face while contorted in intense concentration. Try to someoneâ€"a grown adult, mind youâ€"checking his email. It's like he …

That's what Ogilvy Interactive's Maria Mandel shared with us this morning when she showed us a mobile branding campaign for Ogilvy's "most important client: God." That's right, it seems the Almighty isn't as ominpotent a brand as you might think. At least not in Singapore, where Mandel said God had a "perception issue" among the youth market. "God wasn't perceived as hip and cool among the youth in Singapore," Mandel explained, adding that Ogilvy countered that with a cool media campaign -- an SMS text effort targeting the text messaging market withdaily alerts fro God, such as, "You …

Mandel mentions "Recipes on the Go" mobile program Ogilvy created for Kraft to allow people to register to get recipes via cell phones and to send recipes while shopping back to home computers. Participatns on avg. used at least one recipe via the program, and helped drive sales. I'd only heard about the success of the Kraft iFood recipe app, highlighting the ability of the iPhone to turbo charge mobile programs b/c the ease of use on the device. Ogilvy was only involved in SMS and online parts of Kraft effort; the company developed iFood app separately.

At the risk of hyperbole, the mobile web will become nothing less than “the holy grail of marketing,” insists Ogilvy Interactive’s Mandel. In the not-too-distant future, she said, “the mobile phone becomes ‘the’ killer app.” Presently, according to research cited by Mandel, consumers rank their mobile devices as their third most precious “things” â€" behind only their wallets and keys. Soon, said Mandel, mobile devices will move up from being the third screen to the first screen. That, she said, will warrant no less than $3.3 billion in mobile ad spending by 2013.

At least, that's what Ogilvy Interactive's Maria Mandel said during her keynote at OMMA mobile this morning. While consumers currently see "advertising as a bad word" on mobile media, they are increasingly becoming reliant on their mobile devices, and ultimately will become reliant on using them to conduct all sorts of commerce, including their interactions with marketers. They just may not be thinking of it as advertising, as we know it. When Ogilvy conducted research, it found that consumers consider their cell phones the third most important thing to take with them when they leave home, next to their …

This morning at the OMMA Mobile, Maria Mandel, Executive Director of Digital Innovation at OgilvyInteractive, is trying to answer the one question on everyone’s mind: Is this, finally, ‘The Year’ for mobile. The answer? Yes and no. Finally, said Mandel, “Mobile marketing has started to develop.” Still, as one might expect, “It’s just the beginning.” Nationally, the mobile web has reached about 20% consumer penetration, and, as Mandel notes, it wasn’t until the ‘traditional’ web reached about 30% consumer that advertisers really began to engage with the medium. What key factor is fundamentally transforming / ushering in …

Maria Mandel of of Ogilvy Interactive points up a paradox in mobile advertising in the days second keynote--namely that people say they don't want advertising on their mobile phones. They consider it a more personal devices than other types of technology and want ad messages intruding into this space. That sentiment seems to contradict metrics shown in the prior keynote by Joy Liuzzo showing that mobile advertisng and brand awareness have higher attention rates on mobile than online. Mandel says the key is offering mobile users things like discounts or ads that are highly engaging, funny, dramatic etc. Easier said …

- guess mine are going to be even sorer by the end of today. Not only am I straggling in late to OMMA Mobile, but to my horror, I just realized that I left the power cord for my laptop at home, so guess how I'll be posting on the OMMA Mobile Raw Blog today? Anyone got a spare Dell power cord to lend me? Or a tube of Ben-Gay?