2012 CEO-CMO Summit

As the founding sponsor of the MMA CEO-CMO summit, InMobi hosted 100+ executives at the beautiful Casa De Campo in the Dominican Republic. The theme for this year was Deconstructing Mobile, with the goal to bring clarity about mobile to the industry-at-large, and to give CMOs tangible ways to integrate mobile into their marketing mix. The event started with a beautiful Catalonia boat cruise, followed by a Moroccon themed dinner at the Plaza de Chavon. Our CEO, Naveen Tewari welcomed the esteemed guests with a short speech that highlighted his learnings from running businesses across the globe, including Korea, Japan, EMEA and the US. Over the next two days I had the opportunity to listen and learn from some amazing speakers. Mark Addicks, CMO of General Mills spoke about how his company is experimenting with mobile marketing for its 100+ global brands. He talked about some of their research on consumers, where he highlighted the fact that they see the most ROI for ads that are displayed closest to consumer homes. He also said that they are finding that mobile advertising is working real well for sample coupons as they now can target ads to the right person who intends to make a purchase. He highlighted the fact his company is very excited about the power of mobile and how they are constantly learning and experimenting with this new medium. Another interesting take away for me from the conference was from Irwin Gotlieb, Chairman of Group M. He talked about how tablets are enabling some of the most interesting lean backward experiences. PCs created a lean forward experience and hence were not the ideal medium for consuming media. The iPAD now has made it real easy for users to consume media because it enables lean backward experience, which is fundamentally changing the way brands can market to consumers. Eric Siebert, VP of Digital Marketing of Samsung spoke about his company is looking at turning the mobile device from a source of information where the customer wanted to look up reviews, pricing etc. to managing the complete consumer lifecycle. He discussed how Samsung is now looking to evolve everything from installation, maintenance and ongoing customer support around using mobile technologies. Finally, in a couple of working group sessions, the two most important issues that were discussed were around the challenges faced by marketers to significantly increase spending in mobile advertising. The issues covered here ranged from a consistent taxanomy and measurement criteria for mobile advertising to educating the broader industry around the power of mobile. One of the key announcements that came out at the time of this conference was the Cross Marketing Effectiveness Research study to measure the impact of mobile marketing. Several key players including InMobi have poured more than $1 Million USD to help marketers understand the ROI of mobile marketing.