CTIA 2007 has been over for a few days and I feel like I’m just now coming up for air.
It was a whirlwind of a show, especially for MTV Networks. I gave the opening keynote for the Billboard Mobile Entertainment Live pre-conference (more on that later), we had a half-dozen announcements, Jeremiah Zinn was on panels, I was on panels, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman gave a major keynote at CTIA proper, and we had a massive party with our partners Motricity (that's the pic above). It was perhaps the most exciting and exhausting CTIA I’ve ever been to. Which is saying a lot seeing as how this one was in Orlando, vs. the usual Las Vegas venue.
The show has gotten so big (over 40,000 people this year, and growing) that it’d be difficult for anyone to agree on what the major themes were. Some people, for example, thought that WiMax was the big theme this year. I’m a big WiMax proponent but I frankly didn’t think it stood out as a top topic. Some people thought that stereo Bluetooth stole the show. Others thought the whole category of mobile entertainment was the winner.
I agree that entertainment was indeed the dominant topic and I'd further break down what I thought were some of the bigger mobile content themes at CTIA this year:
Mobile TV
Not a surprise, this one. With MediaFLO in full swing, other multicasters pushing full-steam ahead, and announcements from many major operators on their coming plans in the space it’s no surprise that mobile TV was the talk of the show. Of course you can guess who produces my favorite mobile TV channels (hint hint) – but I’ve also got to tip the hat to my man Salil Dalvi at NBC Universal, who’s done a great job with NBC News2Go on FLO. It’s got the Today Show in the morning, CNBC during the day, MSNBC in the evenings, and the Nightly News every night at 6:30pm. I watch it all the time. Salil has also done a great job of laying out all of NBCU’s mobile offerings at one clear site. Good stuff.
Advertising
This may have been a bigger theme than TV. After Sprint and Verizon threw down the gauntlet at the last CTIA, it was great to see so much movement in the space. We announced our Sprint/Intel deal, for one. And AdMob was out there talking about the $15M they’d just raised; Millennial Media announced new rich media tools; Third Screen rolled out mobile video ad-serving with Amp’d, and there were many, many more announcements in this space. On the flip side, many folks (myself included) called for more standards, more reporting, and more accountability to grow this market even faster. I don’t know if Martin Sorell was at CTIA but he was certainly making this point loud and clear at the 3GSM Summit in New York the day after CTIA. MocoNews has a great write-up here. I think everybody agrees that this is a very important space and that it's critical for advertisers to be here - the question is what can we as an industry do to accelerate this market even more and smooth out some of the ride with regard to execution.
Search
Mobile Search was a theme that surprised me a bit with how huge it was at the show. As the mobile web becomes a more critical part of consumers’ wireless experience with faster networks, more robust handsets, and better user-interfaces I guess it only makes sense that search would begin to take a big role in this space. What better answer to the problems of content discovery than an elegant mobile search solution? And how do you look at the explosive success of search engine marketing online and not expect to port that to mobile world? Yahoo and Google had new products to announce in this space but companies like Medio and JumpTap, who private-label mobile search for operators, also seemed to be generating a lot of interest from publishers, advertisers, and the like. I foresee some interesting battles here.
Standards
Need for more robust standards (ad standards, reporting standards, technical standards, etc.) was a theme from my Billboard speech and I heard it again and again throughout the show. From Disney’s Larry Shapiro who spoke to these issues in his head-to-head showdown with AT&T’s Jim Ryan to the many meetings we had with vendors, advertisers, and operators, standards were a hot topic. Some of these conversations had a distinctly Mobile 2.0 flavor – and the ideas of folks like Rudy De Waele and Daniel Appelquist seemed to be a constant topic of discussion. We know that openness leads to growth and that having common standards for developing, reporting, etc. can only drive mobile innovation further, but what next steps we need to take (and who is responsible for taking them) is still up for debate. At least there is a debate around these issues, and that’s a good thing.
On the “cool new handsets” side of things there were three that seemed to be the buzz of the show. First was the Upstage from Sprint – on one side the device looks and acts just like a phone. Flip it around and it looks and acts like an MP3 player. I played with it a bit and it was easy to get the hang of. Great timing to release this phone just as Sprint moves to $.99 song downloads. People also seemed to love Verizon’s new VCast Live TV phone, the LG VX9400. It’s pretty much made for MediaFLO and looks fantastic.
The other device that had tongues wagging was Helio’s Ocean. InfoWeek called it the best and most innovative product at the show. Don’t know if I’d go that far just yet but I did manage to get my hands on one, if only for a second (after Sky Dayton mocked me for carrying around two devices and let me play with his…) I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty sweet device: compact design, great keyboard, and Microsoft Exchange push email plus AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, EarthLink, Yahoo! Mail, and POP all supported out of the box. I’ll still need to see how things like calendaring and contacts work but at first glance this seems to be a step forward for all-in-one handsets.
All of the above was really just the tip of the iceberg at CTIA. I’m exhausted just thinking about all the things I’m sure I’ve left out of that little recap. And no, I didn’t get back to a description of my keynote like I said I would at the top of this post. Will address that one a little later…
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