NEW YORK - This holiday season will be the first where mobile will play a key role in shaping shopping and buying decisions for today?s convenience-seeking, bargain-hunting consumer, per the consensus at the Mobile Marketing Summit: Holiday Focus 2010.

More Web-enabled smartphones in the market will play a critical role in influencing how consumers interact with content, marketing and commerce over the holidays. A panel of speakers at talked about what mobile-enabled strategies and tactics marketers and retailers should employ to ensure the attention and business of the holiday consumer.

?The risk you run by not including mobile in this year?s holiday marketing strategy is missing a valuable segment of the market,? said Joy Liuzzo, senior director of marketing and mobile research at InsightExpress, New York. ?You need to be where consumers are and know their behavior and what they are searching for.?

Ignoring mobile is risky
Consumers are using their mobile devices to do various things. People are searching, using SMS, buying, conducting price comparisons, surfing the mobile Web and using applications.

These activities will likely spike during the holiday season, when consumers are in purchase-mode.

People are task-oriented during the holidays, according to Jamie Wells, director of global trade marketing for mobile advertising solutions at Microsoft Advertising, Redmond, WA.

?Mobile is the way to secure commanding share of voice during the holidays,? Mr. Wells said. ?People are interrupted from traditional media like television and online, and mobile fills those gaps since consumers have their phone with them all the time.

?People are task-oriented during the holidays and mobile is a task-oriented channel,? he said.

Consumers are spending more time on their mobile devices and less time doing stuff that is tied to traditional media.

The immediacy and relevancy of mobile makes it an important channel to reach consumers through when they are in holiday shopping mode.

Advice for holiday 2010
Maria Mandel, vice president of media and marketing innovation at AT&T Ad Solutions, and North America chair of the Mobile Marketing Association, New York, said that brands should use mobile to build awareness during the holidays because it is one of the only channels that still remains uncluttered.

?Use mobile as a means of breaking away from competitors and to break through the holiday clutter,? Ms. Mandel said.

Mobile can be used during the holidays to build trusted loyalty relationships with customers.

Mobile loyalty programs are a great way to impact the customer during this buying period.

Andrew Koven, president of ecommerce and customer experience at Steve Madden, New York, said that it?s all about being where the customer is and giving them the ability to shop any way they want to.

?There is a lot more acceptance from consumers this holiday season in terms of using mobile to shop and so brands will miss out if they are not there,? Mr. Koven said. 

Shift in attitude
The panelists all agreed that there is a shift in attitude this year.

Brands understand that consumers are increasingly using the mobile Web and applications, and advertisers are going where consumers? eyeballs are. 

SMS is really important this holiday season. Steve Madden is asking consumers for their mobile numbers at the point of sale.

Consumers are open to giving out this personal information since they get valuable alerts and deals by doing so.

?We see that a lot of our clients? goal is to collect emails for marketing purposes,? said Jason Taylor, vice president of global product strategy, Usablenet, New York. ?A lot of our retail clients are mobilizing email sign-up.?

Jay Emmet, senior vice president of Amdocs and general manager of OpenMarket, New York, said that consumers will be willing to give their emails and phone numbers as long as there is a value-exchange.

More mobile users
There are about 100 million consumers surfing the mobile Web and engaging with applications. This number is much higher than the same time last year. 

?Consumers do not think of mobile as something separate,? Ms. Liuzzo said. ?Mobile is just another information source.? 

When it comes to the demographic composition of mobile users, the big eye opener is that it is everybody.

It is a very robust demographic, skewing 35 and up. This is driven by financials.

With all of the higher-end phones, come higher-priced data plans and that is why the mobile consumer is older than expected.

?I think that with 100 million mobile users, we are beyond the point of what the demo of mobile is,? Mr. Wells said. ?I think mobile users are fairly representative of the U.S.

?Basically, if you are looking to target an audience, you will be able to find it on mobile.

Holiday-specific
Mr. Koven suggested that brands and retailers help consumers by providing information that aids in decision-making.

Gift guides, wish lists, holiday specials and other holiday-specific offers are key.

?The rules of the game have not changed drastically,? Mr. Koven said. ?Take the best practices from the retail store and traditional media, and translate that to mobile.

Ms. Mandel said that marketers need to concentrate on using the targeting capability of mobile to segment and provide appropriate messages to consumers based on that.

Marcus Startzel, senior vice president of sales at Millennial Media, Baltimore, MD, said that brands that want to achieve scale in mobile need to go cross platform.

It is not just about the iPhone anymore. BlackBerry and Android are important as well. 

?Don?t narrow targeting to one device,? Mr. Startzel said.

Multichannel
A multichannel strategy is a must.

The deeper you connect campaigns across screens the better results will be, per Microsoft?s Mr. Wells.

Have a mobile-specific search strategy. What works in online may not work in mobile.

Mr. Wells said that 15 percent of searches on Bing?s iPhone client are voice searches.

OpenMarket?s Mr. Emmet said that SMS might not be sexy, but it works on every single handset.

?We see success in broadness,? Usablenet?s Mr. Taylor said. ?Make sure people can purchase from any phone and make sure you are able to track where it came from.?

Here are some photos from the panel:

Final take
Giselle Tsirulnik, senior editor of Mobile Marketer and Mobile Commerce Daily, interviewed a delegate after this panel regarding what she wanted to learn at the show.
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