When you google MMA, you’ll find two things. One, the fighting style used to determine the Ultimate Fighting Champion is called Mixed Martial Arts. Two, the mobile marketing industry has its own association, namely the Mobile Marketing Association . Although I do occasionally stop when channel surfing at night and watch in astonishment a UFC fight, professionally the Mobile Marketing Assocation is of more interest to me.

While the USA was long considered to be a market less developed in terms of mobile network technology than Europe, one would not expect that a global trade group would have its roots in such a market. Through its leading position and experience in marketing however, the importance of having an industry-specific international board was realized in the year 2000 already, and lead to the foundation of the Wireless Advertising Assocation in New York. Together with its European counterpart, the Wireless Marketing Assocation, the MMA was formed and its headquarters remained in the USA.

The mobile industry and mobile as a relatively new marketing channel especially, is in certain aspects still suffering from a lack of standards, common understanding of terms and fewer best practice cases as in other industries. The MMA as an industry organization provides valuable insights, guidance and offers a forum where members of the industry, including cell phone manufacturers, carriers and operators, advertisers, brands and agencies, can discuss certain developments and influence their directions.

In a world with thousands of different devices, varying network standards, different laws and regulations in each country, a central international body that brings all players together seems essential.

For anyone new or interested in mobile marketing, the MMA offers a good introduction and a lot of material to browse through. For anyone already in the industry the policies and guidelines are a valuable source for direction and inspiration. For example, the MMA’s Mobile Advertising Guidelines not only help to standardize mobile advertising elements, but also offer advertisers and brands a source to ensure they are getting good, if not great, high quality mobile marketing.

As part if the internationalization efforts, MMA Germany was launched in September 2009. It will be interesting to see if and how this will effect mobile marketing in Germany.

In your opinion, has the MMA had any effects in your country? I am curious to hear what you think we can expect from the new MMA Germany.

Tags: mobile marketing, Mobile Marketing Association

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 4:25 pm by Jens Bay and is filed under General, mobile marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.