Jim Brooks entertained and educated at the YCF digital conference in Glasgow today.

His background covers a ton of stuff and he could have easily filled a day or two or even more with informed comment on the advertising industry. His background was skipped all too briefly but it includes Orange marketing and Big Brother voting.

His interests within Capgemini are allowing him to focus on the challenge of mobile advertising and the challenge is significant. He summed the challenge up quite simply…

“the mobile industry activated SIMs – not people!”

The advertising industry don’t want volume they want the demographic information. He likened the mobile industry as trying to behave as if it were simply the junk mail industry of 10 years back. And the advertising industry can’t buy that. They want to use the channel but can’t do so effectively – so they don’t. Advertising needs to target the correct customer base.

However, if it’s cracked then a whole new advertising field is opened up. The mobile is not the internet – it’s better than that – it’s better than CPM. He emphasised that mBlox present the mobile transaction datasets in millions – but nobody cares about that in the advertising industry - they need profile information. He rejected intrusive adverts on phones (persuasion not invasion) such as “you have just past the best coffee and buns shop”.

It’s all about customer profile. Coincidently we have just covered profiling on Online Marketing Scotland wrt website traffic. Profile – the next Search Engine Optimisation trick.