Pragmatic Paddy

Last night I went to the advertising club of new york meetup at Microsoft’s office, with my girlfriend. The meeting was focussed on advertising on mobile phones. I had been to one of these events before, at google, that event was ok. This event wasn’t, it was horrible.

To start with the audience was full of dead people. Most of the people in the audience were 35+ year olds who worked in traditional media advertising agencies. They were confused by basic internet advertising metrics. I don’t know how to explain it. The room was full of the type of business people that tech guys hate. Full of people who would say “Let’s do a facebook app” and then spend $1m to build it because they chose a slick manager who is incompetent.

One of the presenters, Dean Collins, presented his Amatheon’s mobile analytics software. Early in his presentation he had a slide that said something along the lines of ” Traditional analytics don’t work on mobile phones. You can’t tell which handset visitors are using. You can’t tell where they are coming from. You can’t tell what resolution they are using” he then said “Does anyone disagree?”. I raised my hand and answered “I do. The only browser in the mobile space that matters is the iPhone. And all of the traditional anayltics work on it”. He replied “I don’t care about the iPhone, its only 4% of the market and not what we are aiming for.”

I was embarrassed that I had attacked Dean so viciously. I think it was the way he challenged the audience, saying “does anyone disagree”, it just set me off. It is hard to get attacked when you are presenting to an audience. Given that, I feel that my statement was correct.

Collins went on detailing how his software provides analytics for the mobile space. He went on to describe his software pretty well, it looked impressive. The software also is inexpensive for what it does. The quality of their software aside, I think the working with amatheon would be helpful for a company, because amatheon knows the mobile analytics space.