Mobile marketing still in its infancy

• More work still needed to build mobile marketing
• Ad agencies need convincing
• Research data required

Singapore - According to Frank Brown, the chairman of ColorZip SEA and one of the leading founders of MTV Networks International, plenty of work is still required by the mobile marketing industry to bring it out of its infancy and convince advertising agencies to take the medium more seriously.

Speaking at the Mobile Marketing Forum Asia, which was held in Singapore over the past two days, Brown spoke of the various challenges still facing the burgeoning industry.

"I think we can do a much better job as an industry to convince the ad agencies to take this medium more seriously," Brown said.

"It's a pretty common problem for a start-up company or a start-up industry, which we still are, that it takes a lot of persuasion and some compelling arguments to really get the agencies on board."

Brown explained that one big obstacle for the mobile industry to overcome is research data and that there is a strong need to establish a common currency.

"You have that common currency in traditional media but the difficulty with mobile is that every case is different and what they're looking for is different," Brown said.

"The measurement of success can be quite diverse so we have to figure out the research conundrum and be able to deliver that in a way that the agencies can relate to."

Brown was a key factor in growing MTV's brands across Europe and Asia and he oversaw the launch of more than 20 TV channels, as well as consumer product divisions and online and mobile media initiatives.

The Mobile Marketing Forum covered a range of similar topics to what Brown discussed - all of interest to brands and agencies, content creators, aggregators and media houses, operators and regulators, device manufacturers, application developers and platform owners. More than 175 delegates attended the event with an additional 150 people accessing the live webcast feed from around the world.