MLM SF: A Smashing Good Time

Thanks to all who attended or contributed to our Mobile Local Media conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. It was by all measures a success. Google, Groupon, Pandora, PayPal, Yelp, Stewart Alsop … you can’t go wrong. We even had comedy and live music (more on that in a bit).

I’m glad to say we accomplished my No. 1 goal of avoiding yet another mobile conference that gets stuck in platitudes and aspirational dialogue about how great mobile is. There was real talk, lots of data, and concrete case studies to illustrate what’s working — and what’s not — in mobile.

There were lots of themes that threaded the day but most prevalent was crafting mobile products, content delivery and ad campaigns that boost value. For example, the current imbalance between supply (mobile usage/ad inventory) and demand (ad dollars) has kept mobile ad rates and ARPUs depressed.

So how to increase advertiser demand? How to establish premium sources of ad inventory? For the latter, location targeting was discussed as the biggest relevance driver. But what is location targeting? We’re not yet at pervasive lat/long targeting, and publisher-supplied location data are often too broad.

We’ll be unpacking all the great content from the event in the weeks to come. That includes reports, blog posts right here and the sessions of our next big events on the calendar. There’s a lot happening in mobile, but the opportunity is tempered by a prevailing counterbalance of challenges and question marks.

For those interested in more content from the conference, the slides can be downloaded here. We’ll soon have video up at that same link, and you can see the Flickr feed here. See our session-by-session blogging coverage aggregated here, and stay tuned for lots more.