Like any great Madison Avenue ad executive, Starcom's Jack Sullivan is an expert on the subject of positioning. But normally, he's discussing the positioning of one of his client's brands, or the position they occupy on some out-of-home media placement. To kick the discussion off during the big buyer's panel at this morning's Digital Out-of-Home Forum, Sullivan pointed out the position of a column buttressing the room at the Crowne Plaza hotel in New York, the venue for the forum's meeting. The column was set dead center in the room, and Sullivan quipped that it was likely "well positioned between …

Yep, PQ Media chief and Digital OOH Forum opener Patrick Quinn got things off on a depressing note, citing, well, the Great Depression. Which of course, wasn’t so great. And neither was 2009 for the advertising industry. It was the first year since the Great Depression that the ad industry saw two consecutive years of declines. The good news for digital out-of-home media, is that it actually managed to grow, albeit at a tiny 0.7% rate of growth. Still, that was pretty good, compared to PQ’s estimate for a 14% decrease in overall ad spending last year.

Talk about your mobile app envy, BBDO's Chad Stoller thinks things have gone a little amuck, citing a scenario in which "somebody gets a phone that can butter toast, and another person exclaims, 'Holy shit, why can't my phone do that now?'" "I feel like I'm living in Japan right now," Stoller quipped.

That's the surprising evolution of the smart phone user, according to Chad Stoller, EVP Digital Strategy at BBDO. Speaking on the Buyers' Roundtable panel at OMMA Mobile, Stoller said the ubiquity and ease of smart phone access is breeding new casual browsing habits among consumers that could well challenge the conventional notion of TV's couch potatoes. Stoller said smart phone users are starting to use their phones to browse while sitting on their couches watching TV. More people are leisurely consuming mobile data," he said, asking attendees if they happen to know how much mobile data people are …

"Don't believe if you build a branded app people are going to give a crap," Sloan Broderick, Managing Partner, Managing Director at MediaCom Interaction, told the audience, sounding a bracing note on the media buyer panel this afternoon. He was picking up on a point made by Rachel Pasqua, director, Mobile Strategy at iCrossing, that marketers can't just throw things against the wall to see if they stick in mobile the way they might on the desktop Web because its a more fragmented, highly targeted medium. "You can get in front of a much smaller audience but get a much …

In the afternoon keynote, Charles Johnson, general manager, mobile advertising at Microsoft previewed the company's new MSN home page optimized for smartphones and which goes live Thursday. The new home page sports a cleaner, more streamlined look on a white background and is tightly integrated via dynamic tabs with other Microsoft properties including its Bing search engine. By maintaining a single mobile banner ad placement, Microsoft also aims to insure that ads are positioned to drive user engagement and awareness and avoid clutter. The higher response rates on mobile have been attributed in part to mobile pages running fewer …

That's one of the top lines from a new study released this morning by JiWire. The research, dubbed the "On-The-Go Audience" report, also found that mobile users have an average of 22 apps on their mobile device, and that 76% of them prefer free, ad-supported apps over the premium kind. "People have a completely different perception of mobile content and advertising when they're on-the-go compared to when they're at home or in the office," says David Staas, senior vice president of marketing at JiWire. "With nearly half of the on-the-go mobile audience saying they are more likely to …

In mobile, things aren't changing every 18 months, "they're changing every 18 minutes," according to Michael Gartenberg, Partner, at the Altimeter Group. He pointed to the rapidly changing landscape, like Apple getting into advertising, Google becoming a smartphone maker, and Palm going from being dead to instantly revived though its rescue by HP. He says there are 10 mobile platforms developers are creating for but that crowd will get thinned down to three or four ultimate winners. "Anyone who can tell you who they are, are lucky not good," he says. For brands its especially tricky because they have to …

How many of you remember the non sequitur comedian and performance artist Andy Kaufman? You know, the guy who played Latka on "Taxi?" That's who OMMA Mobile moderator Alan Chapell likened mobile media to. "You never really knew if Andy was joking or not," Chapell said, adding, "The whole wrestling thing, I was never really sure if he was serious or not into his endeavors into the wrestling ranks." Well, I'd like to think I knew about Andy's seriousness (if you ask me, it's a bit like Sara Silveraman's seriousness. They're both serious about their comedy, and wrestling, …

Introducing the second agency-focused panel of the day, moderator Alan Chappelle compared mobile to late, great comedian Andy Kaufman, "because everyone is doing everything, and everything is upside down and we're not sure if folks are really serious about this," he said. It's wild, wacky and no one knows what's going on. Does this mean REM will write a song about mobile too?