Wehrs resigns as head of Mobile Marketing Association

Mike Wehrs has resigned as CEO and president of the Mobile Marketing Association, just shy of one year on the job, to return to the commercial sector. The MMA is beginning an executive level search for his replacement, and Wehrs will consult in the position through June.
“Mike’s leadership has been beneficial not only to the MMA but the industry itself,” said Federico Pisani, MMA Global Chairman and CEO of Hanzo Inc. Pisani will serve as interim chairman. “We are disappointed to see him leave but support him in his goals to return to the commercial sector and appreciate him staying on as a special advisor for a period of time. Having benefited from Mike’s leadership, the MMA has transformed over the past year and is finishing 2009 in a great position. Together with the board and our members, Mike has strengthened the global association and positioned the MMA as the world’s leading trade association for mobile marketing and the source for best practices, guidelines and case studies which protect the consumer experience.”
Wehrs is credited with updating the association’s consumer best practices for cross-carrier mobile content services so mobile marketers no longer have to customize their messages for the four nationwide carriers. In an interview with RCR Wireless News in August, Wehrs estimated savings of about $200 million by getting the four nationwide carriers to agree to one set of standards. 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,” Wehrs noted at the time.
Wehrs took the MMA reins from Laura Marriott, who had led the association the previous three years. Before taking the position at MMA, Wehrs was VP of industry affairs and evangelism for Nuance Communications Inc., a developer of speech-recognition technology that has moved aggressively into mobile in recent years. His resume also includes a stint as VP of product management and global marketing for Tegic Communications, a predictive text company Nuance acquired from AOL in 2007. Prior to that he worked in the mobile effort of Microsoft Corp.