Ross Levinsohn, general partner Fuse Capital, opened OMMA Media Friday throwing out some stats. As media consumption continues to change, Levinsohn predicts 2010 will become the year video breaks through and become part of the mainstream advertising media buy. This is why: YouTube streams about 1.2 billion videos per day worldwide. Hulu streams about 488 million monthly video streams. About 26% of U.S. internet audience streamed a full-length TV show in August. The average consumer watches about 157 videos per month, he says citing comScore.

So you've built the iPhone application and uploaded it into the Apple store, but how do you get it ranked high enough to get noticed? Wendy Feldman, executive director of mobile marketing and digital promotions at Sony Pictures, says you must make apps relevant to a specific audience. She says you must get homepage placement in the iTunes storefront. Unless you get that placement it becomes extremely difficult to get noticed, she says. Sony also works with companies like Fandango to target consumers. "Our core goal is to build brand awareness to sell more tickets," she says. Lynn Tornabene, …

According to Sean Bender, a senior associate with GGV Capital, the typical app is opened all of twice. That's pretty pathetic (the second go 'round, you can sort of picture the user thinking, "Maybe I didn't give this enough of a chance... no, no, it actually does suck.") A statistic to deflate the bold claims of app-icianados, in the same tradition as "99% of blogs are never updated."

Playing devil's advocate, Josh Lovison -- a former MediaPoster, now the gaming and mobile lead at IPG's emerging media lab -- led the panel on spatial/location-based marketing by asking: "What's the ROI of location?" Andrew Thackray, director of strategic alliances for Navteq Media Solutions, said "it's incredibly efficient, if we do it right," allowing delivery of ultra-targeted advertising. But on the other side of the issue, there's a problem of limited supply, observed Nihal Mehta, CEO of Buzzd: "As you get down to the city level, and then the neighborhood level, and then the block level, you have significantly less …

What is location-based targeting worth to me as an advertiser? That was the first question thrown out to a panel of mobile media and location-based mobile services providers at the OMMA Mobile conference in Los Angeles. Andrew Thackery, Director, Strategic Alliances, NAVTEQ Media Solutions, and Nihal Mehta, CEO, Buzzd, agreed that location targeting doesn’t do much in and of itself, but becomes much more powerful when delivered in the right context to your core audience. “Delivering an ad when you’re out and about, when you’re in a certain frame of mind--if you can add location relevance, contextual relevance, demographic …

"We've seen app after app integrate location awareness -- whether its relevant or not," says Andrew Thackray, Director, Strategic Alliances, NAVTEQ Media Solutions. He says that mobile is the secret sauce that is going to make mobile advertising take off. "Location eliminates a lot of waste," he says. "It delivers an ad as close as you can get to the purchase point." As someone pointed out in a Raw blog comment, that last yard is a billion miles, so as close as you can get can still be pretty far. Not often enough location is a core campaign …

What's the bare minimum opt-in rate for retailers to find value in mobile marketing? According to Eric Holmen of Smartreply, 5% -- "If you can't get to 5% of their [customer] database within 8-9 months, they tend to start feeling fatigue." That said, Holmen added that Smartreply "aims for 18%-19%" -- numbers that make retailers recognize the potential of the medium (and invest even more).

"The phone is all about simplifying your life," according to Greg Grunberg, founder of Yowza, who, by the way, also plays Matt Parkman on the TV show "Heroes." Yowza plans to run a golden ticket promotion where consumers think they are getting 15% off, but instead Yowza and the sponsor will take care of the bill, he says. The coupon application is location based and can return discounts to your phone in a specific mile radius.

Greg Grunberg, the co-founder of Yowza! (a mobile coupon service) fits right in on an OMMA panel -- he's got that combination of geeky enthusiasm and laid-back expertise -- but he has a special advantage in promoting Yowza!: he's also the highly-recognizable actor who plays the hapless mind-reading cop in the TV show "Heroes." Listing his company's promotional partnerships, he enthused: "Yowza is a [prize] wedge on 'Wheel of Fortune.' That's huge."

"Retailers are traditionally very risk-averse" in their media strategies, observes Eric Holmen, the president of Smartreply, but the dual trends of media fragmentation and the broader recession are forcing them to innovate. Once again, offering customers greater convenience through mobile can give retailers a key competitive edge.