Leading off the Weekend Edition of the Mobile Insider Summit on Saturday is keynoter Linda Gangeri, manager for national advertising at Volvo Cars of North America. Has anyone seen a Volvo in North America lately? Just kidding! “I’m not a mobile expert,” confesses Gangeri, who admits to relying on agency partners at Havas for help. What it all boils down to is content, she says. And good content comes from consumer insights. Gangeri says Volvo under Ford is stuck in a kind of auto twilight zone between the mass market and the high end like Mercedes and BMW. It wants …

As it turns out, Siri's older sister's name is Directory Assistance.

That's how John Busby, vice president of the Marches Institute, kicked off his luncheon presentation at MediaPost's Mobile Insider Summit in Key Largo. Busby should know what he's doing, because as head of research and analytics for a "digital call advertising company," he focuses a great deal on what people do with their mouths, you know phone calls.

In the day’s final presentation, Jose Puente, director, product strategy, at AutoTrader, talks about how the company leverage mobile for its Hispanic customers via its Spanish-language AutoTrader Latino offering. Given that the Latino audience typically over-indexes on mobile, the company launched text messaging, iPhone and Android apps, and an Augmented Reality 2D code, among other facets including Facebook to better reach the target audience. Text messages from codes placed in the print AutoTrader Latino magazine sent people to the companion Web site. We notified dealers when an anonymous user had texted in about a car from their dealership to respond …

It looks like Autotrader has been successful in making its conversion to mobile, according to Director of Product Strategy-Mobile/Affinity Brands Jose Puente. Currently, about "45% of all our activity comes in from mobile," he told Mobile Insider Summit attendees. Presumably, he meant "mobile" mobile, not magazine mobile (see earlier post), but he did note that magazines are playing an important role in even that mix.

Everyone love to knock Craigslist for disintermediating the newspaper classified business, but according to Jose Puente, director of product strategy- mobile/affinity brands, Autotrader.com they were their first. Speaking at MediaPost's Mobile Insider Summit in Key Largo this morning, Puente reminder attendees that Autotrader began as a print medium by "a guy" who thought newspapers were an inefficient way to service the marketplace of people looking to buy and sell cars. So he created a magazine to focus on that, and "got rid of the rest of the newspaper."

Sapient's Dan Israel says retailers are grappling with living in the era of radical price transparency because of the ease of making price comparisons via mobile. "Retailers no longer have the home field advantage in their own stores," he said. That means they have to try to engage customers on an ongoing basis, before during and after they leave the store. In that vein, Ashley Harmeling of retailer Rue La La says the company tries to keep customers engaged with its app whlle in the store waiting online, or any where else they might need to kill time. But israel …

The holiday season already seems a distant memory here in hot, humid Florida, but the second Summit panel on Friday focuses on mobile results from the year-end shopping biitz. One clear theme is that tablets are for e-commerce buying and smartphones are for browsing. Sheila Collins, who head consumer digital marketing at American Express said customers using tablets spend 20% to 30% more than those using other devices. Similarly, Dan Israel, who leads mobile practice for Sapient Nitro, noted about 24% of all consumer throught the phone was a useful tool for shopping. Forsmarpthone owners, that figure rose to 38%; …

What were results of the Snowball Effect campaign? Coke’s Anders Pers, isn’t sharing details but says the program drove a lot of traffic to 7-11 and is the most successful campaign its ever run with 7-11. The store chain got people to  buy more and and more often. He also said the program had 99% activation across 7-11’s more than 6,000 outlets. “That’s almost unheard of for us,” said Pers. “So for us this has really been great and great for relationship with 7/11.” He created Leo Burnett’s Arc unit with playing a very big role in the effort. “The …

Switching to big brands, Coca-Cola takes center stage to explain how it teamed up with 7-Eleven to create in-store programs reach millennials with via mobile devices. The beverage giant’s Anders Pers starts by cracking open a Coke to prove he actually eats his own dog food, so to speak. He brings a gust of cold air to balmy Florida by showing slids and discussing Coke’s “Arctic Home” campaign with the World Wildlife Fund to help save the polar bear. Coke approached 7-Eleven about extending “Arctic Home’ to convenience store chain. Molly Garris, mobile lead at Arc Worldwide, which worked with …