MMA’s Wehrs balances big picture with nuts-and-bolts details

SEATTLE–Since taking over as head of the Mobile Marketing Association in January, Mike Wehrs has juggled international expansion, carrier cooperation and the more boring, but essential work of fine-tuning the business processes needed to successfully run a trade association that counts more than 700 member companies in 40 countries.
Wehrs had just returned from the Philippines when he met up with RCR Wireless News in August, where the MMA had announced a partnership with a similar mobile marketing group to launch a MMA Local Council there. Earlier this week, the group announced it has established MMA Germany as part of its continuing partnership with the German Federal Association for the Digital Economy’s mobile division. These deep partnerships worldwide with local groups are important to the association’s global growth and testament to the fact that global brands are going to market their products on a global scale. While there certainly will continue to be variations in regional campaigns, scale matters.
That sentiment carries through to the United States, where the MMA just updated its consumer best practices for cross-carrier mobile content services. In essence the document lays out the guidelines mobile marketers must follow to send mobile content via SMS, MMS, short codes, interactive voice responses and the mobile Web. In reality, the latest update to the guides marked the first time a mobile marketer did not have to customize its message four different times to send it across Verizon Wireless’ network, AT&T Mobility’s network, Sprint Nextel Corp.’s network and T-Mobile USA Inc.’s network. The MMA estimates savings of about $200 million by getting the four nationwide carriers to agree to one set of standards, Wehrs said. Each carrier had sound practices in place, but each had its own nuances, so while one carrier may mandate the message “standard messaging rates may apply, another carrier was using a slightly different version of the same phrase. The impetus behind the agreement: money. “A half-trillion dollars goes through the marketing channel. Carriers get less than 1% of that.”
There’s still much work to be done as mobile marketing begins to gain traction. Metrics that measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign are still an inhibitor to adoption, Wehrs noted. “CPM (cost per thousand) measures awareness. If that’s all we do in mobile, we’re missing the point.”
Mobile 2-D barcodes has the potential to not only change mobile marketing, but how a company monitors its inventory, Wehrs said. Beyond thinking about the role the MMA can play in those large life-changing advances, Wehrs said he also has to focus on the nuts and bolts of running the trade group. “MMA grew so fast.” Much like mobile marketing itself, the MMA needs to be able to scale to serve its hundreds of member companies with a small staff and volunteer board members.