Mobile Media Strategies - early thoughts and content encapsulation

I’m having a bit of a ho-hum day at the Mobile Media Strategies event – my gut feeling is that I’m the wrong audience for the conference. It feels more like a conference for very senior level executives who kinda know that mobile is important, but want to be brought up to speed, rather than the mid-level do-ers, who are living and breathing mobile already. The fact there’s far more paper notetaking, and a general paucity of mobile devices in use (see pic, right) suggests that my assessment is correct.

There have been some fair points – Ilicco Elia’s point that not having a mobile optimised site right now is a huge fail is spot-on, as was Justin Moodie from Dorling Kindersley’s exhortation to experiment and learn, as there’s no established wisdom in this space to call on.

The Economist‘s Tom Standage made some interesting points – they have a strict limits on how many pages that the magazine carries, simply because of the readers’ time limitation. They are (essentially) doing curation and aggregation for things you don’t yet know that you wnat to know. They are selling the feeling of being “informed” – which a website never gives – you never get the catharsis of finishing the weeks’ news. And that’s a good reason for encapsulation on a mobile device.

I wasn’t so keen on his focus on the integrated subscription – it’s a very publisher-centric model, that actually disrespects the desires of the customer. Still, he was arguing for a strategy that was selling access to the content as a package, and allows you to access in in any way, rather than buying access to a particular channel. I’m not sure that mindset is prevalent amongst consumers, but they’ve had over 2m downloads, and 650,000 uniques devices using their content weekly monthly, 50% of which are paying subscribers. 20% of their circulation are using the apps – and the same number again are trying them out on mobile devices.