CTIA Wireless 2008: Mobile Marketing Keynote. Mobile & Ford's success

Cary Tilds from Team Detroit (They don't really have a website to link to, so here is a link to another Team Detroit...LoL) gave the keynote speech yesterday at the Marketing - the mobile channel seminar.

Team Detroit is a WPP joint venture of JWT, Y&R, Wunderman, Ogilvy and GroupM. One of their big clients is Ford.
They have a few different (although they all sound very similar to me) departments at Team Detroit:
1. Digital media
2. Digital investment & strategy
3. Digital communications planning
4. Digital retail communications planning
5. Emerging media digital planning

Cary focused heavily on the topic of search. Even though mobile web use is very encouraging, it is still growing. She mentions that when content will become more available, people will search more. Her agency sells mobile in as a mainstream channel, not as emerging.

Personally I think there is already a vast amount of mobile content available and the reason people aren't searching is because they don't know it's out there and probably don't know how to find it or what the costs are involved with doing so. When you look at most ads/promotions there is very little mention of any mobile component. At the moment a lot of people are finding this content through their online web regulars or on-deck (the carrier portal the phone comes with).

I was surprised to see the classic 'awareness, opinion, consideration, shop, choose, buy'-funnel diagram they use for their planning. It felt strangely old, clunky and very out of place in today's convergence culture.

In 2007 Team Detroit launched mobile campaigns for Sync, (she showed the commercial I've seen so many times, only this time it was much slower than the usual 2 second TiVo blur) Edge, Focus and Expedition all in 4 months.

The Edge purchase consideration increased by 31% across all age groups and had a 114% lift within the 28-34 year old market. So yeah, mobile works.

When she started talking about this, I was like great, finally someone willing to share a successful case study with everyone in the room. But outside of results she wasn't willing to share how they did it. nice.

Share people, so we can all learn and get better, faster.

some arb stats:
248 million cellphones in US
116 million video enabled
60 million 3G phones

Mobile Phones represent 86% of the mobile web market.
Smartphones represent 14% (Blackberry has 7.5%) - huge growth will come from this space as phones become, well, smarter.