Highlights from Mobile Marketing Africa Focus Day at Mobile Web in Africa 2012

To kick off proceedings was Musa Kalenga, Group Head: Digital Marketing at Nedbank, who talked about banking in the mobile era. He focused on Nedbank’s experience and rolling out their App suite which received 94,000 downloads within its first 90 days.

Kalenga added “content is a very important part of our business,” in elaborating on part of their mobile and mobile marketing strategy.

Zeyad Davids, Managing Director at M & C Saatchi, was next on stage and discussed how mobile is having an impact on Big Data, elaborating on how the proliferation of smartphones has changed how data is being collected and used. The main focus of his talk was on user behaviour as far as mobile marketing is concerned and how to use that data collected to anticipate mobile user needs.

An interesting comment during the panel discussion came from digital advertiser Shinka’s (part of World of Avatar group) Paul Stemmet who explained Nokia seems to have come back in a big way in Africa this year with the Nokia Express mobile phone eclipsing the Samsung E250 as South Africa s the “AK-47 of mobile “.

Lynne Gordon, of Brandtone South Africa, gave a presentation on how they used mobile, mainly using USSD, SMS and voice, to change football marketing in South Africa with the Carling Black Label Cup that engaged 20 million mobile users.

Nadeem and Hafiz Juma related how their company, AIM, uses mobile marketing mainly on feature phones in Tanzania by creating communities for the brands they work with.

Remarkable content and getting it to the right people at the right time was the focus of Mike Sharman’s talk as he narrated on some of the campaigns they have worked on at Retroviral.

Jonathan Endersby from PRAEKELT rounded off the talks with an example of how PRAEKELT changed perceptions around spirits in Kenya through user engagement on mobile phones.

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