BERLIN, GERMANY -  The Mobile Marketing Association?s Mobile Marketing Forum featured a global brand lineup, proving that mobile is becoming more mainstream in terms of marketing.

Here is a summary of some of the highlights from the conference, according to Harald Neidhardt, chief marketing officer and cofounder of Smaato Inc., who was reporting for Mobile Marketer from Berlin Sept. 9-10.

?Ich bin ein Berliner,? the famous words spoken by JFK, are now true for the MMA coming to Berlin.

The morning opened with an impressive video where 10,000 runners cross the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul, from Asia into Europe, during what is normally the middle of rush hour.

Zafar Parlar, managing director of Nike Turkey, talked about the Human Race 10K from last year and the experience of promoting the event with mobile.

Mobile was one of the most used mediums to promote consumers to sign-up to participate in the campaign.

Coke is it
Following Nike was another fast moving consumer goods heavyweight: Coke.

Hinde Pagani, senior mobile marketing manager at the Coca-Cola Co. unveiled the soft drink brand had more than 500,000 downloads for an iPhone application without any media support.

Classic mobile marketing gets a new acronym: UTC for text-to-win campaigns, where UTC means ?under the cap.?

Mr. Pagani was sharing UTC tactics in several regional markets like Britain and India, with free talk time as prizes. There were 5 million responses in total and a peak of 111,000 responses per day.

In Germany, Fanta used UTC for free minutes or free SMS to ease consumers? phone budgets. This was the first time in Germany that a completely zero-rated marketing experience together with all major carriers was launched.

AKQA helps Coke in building brand equity and brand love in 13 international markets: The largest global mobile campaign launched last year for the holiday-season.

Each market worked differently, although it was the goal to work with one key visual worldwide.

The campaign was integrated online with MSN and Facebook, especially in South America. The results were a 7.4 percent uplift in overall brand opinion and consumption intent.

Coke is listening to their audience.

?If the consumers are into augmented reality, we will go there,? Mr. Hinde stated.

There was a nice tidbit on the closing powerpoint slide from Coke interviews with boys and girls ages 16-18 in Moscow. ?Life without my phone would suck," was the consensus.

Mobile Beamer
Paul Berney, the marketing director for the MMA in Europe brought together a stellar brand lineup.

He introduced Marc Mielau from BMW as the first rock star of mobile in Europe, as he is regularly approached by a flock of people in conferences after each speech.

BMW?s Sheer Driving Pleasure campaigns feature a healthy mobile component.

Mr. Mielau reviewed his Mobile Everything vision as part of the user-centered, digital marketing environment he is practicing at BMW.

His marketing view shows a large and complex tag cloud of all digital themes and how they relate to the sales funnel reaching a very volatile customer.

?I prefer 270 degrees interlinked rather than 360-degree integrated campaigns, because it could become too complex to handle and has higher risk of failure,? Mr. Mielau said.

Mr. Mielau?s view is that mobile does not work in a vacuum?it needs a trigger like television spots or Web TV clips, for example.

Therefore, other channels inspire consumers to upload user-generated amateur versions on YouTube, which took place during the campaign to promote the BMW Z4 roadster.

The free BMW Z4 iPhone application achieved 1 million downloads in the App Store in the first few weeks.

The iPhone is also the No. 1 mobile device?37 percent?among BMW M sports car drivers, which was polled using their own online community.

Look for a G-Meter application scheduled to launch next week for people with a need for speed and whowant to measure their own racing stats.

Other examples include BMW?s cooperation with Vodafone and the BMW.mobi site for the automaker's brand campaign.

BMW is also targeting fans of rock ?n? roll and Formula 1 racing. The new BMW F1 team racing application is coming to the App Store as soon as next week, even though BMW is exiting the F1 series at the end of the current season.

?Save time or kill time,? Mr. Mielau said, repeating the mantra for consumers? top reasons for using mobile media.

However, he added a note of caution regarding experimentation for the sake of novelty.

?If you cannot track it, kill it,? Mr. Mielau said.

Lufthansa?s mobile initiatives take off
After an informative introduction to the newly formed MMA Germany regional chapter by the passionate René Bellack of Vodafone, the next megabrand was introduced ? Lufthansa.

Marcus Casey, director of ecommerce and mobile at Lufthansa shared his top 10 golden rules of mobile and charted his company?s rise to mobile success in recent years.

Lufthansa now has 80 percent of mobile traffic coming from iPhone and BlackBerry users: Überflieger? (uber-flyers, as I would call them).

Lufthansa must have the most innovative approach to use mobile devices to save time and money, as well as be ecofriendly.

The company?s use of 2D bar codes as a paperless check-in mechanism works extremely well and is used day by day across all of the Lufthansa check-in kiosks at airports.

Procter & Gamble
P&G has a manager for the mobile subject matter: Dagmara Brylak for the Central Europe and Middle East & Africa (CEEMEA) region.

Ms. Brylak shared internal research and her view on the mobile market: P&G?s concern is that fast-moving consumer goods are still not playing big in mobile media and that 87 percent of advertising agencies still do not use mobile yet.

So, the company?s conclusion is that they need to seek out the general masses, not necessarily the high-end application stores and smartphone users.

P&G has great examples from speakers at the 2008 MMF Europe in Budapest or at MMF Asia in Singapore earlier this year.

Big-picture view of the mobile industry
A glimpse of the future reveals obvious data for the mobile native: Microsoft, Google and Nokia are in the market and are growing their mobile business vertically.

Mobile TV and video have high potential in developed markets.

Mobile networks are emerging, according to Third Screen Media.

Europe is a big region, and speaking from a Central/Eastern European background to delegates mostly from developed countries and the leading mobile media club is a challenge, unless you dig deep and show examples how mobile will help brands reach consumers in their home region.

Party time, excellent
The evening of day one saw the kick-off party for the Smaato Awards 2009 for all participants of MMF Berlin in one of the top night-life locations in Berlin: The Rodeo Club.

Smaato launched the awards ceremony in style with some jury members in attendance such as Bena Roberts of GoMoNews, Mar Wächter of BVDW-MMA Germany, Matthäus Kryskowski of VentureBeat and Peggy Anne Salz of MSearchGroove.

When forty members of the TurkCell mobile marketing clan entered the partyzone it was apparent that the big Turkish delegation is innovative and also really fun.

Day Two: Pepsi, TurkCell
Day two got a refreshing head start with master of ceremonies Mark Wächter from the newly announced German chapter of the MMA.

Mobile Marketing Manager Elvin Atun opened day two with Ugur Oglu, Pepsi?s marketing director, who revealed impressive numbers. TurkCell now boasts 8.1 million subscribers to its opt-in database.
To put that in perspective, that is 10 percent of the Turkish population.

Pepsi has run 213 campaigns with TurkCell with a total reach of 80 million people.

The TurkCell Youth Club has 15 million members, which is believed to be the largest mobile youth club in the world.

?SureWin? is a new term coined for campaigns for getting free airtime just for participation. GNCTRKCLL ?5757 Gönder!? means more or less ?text-to-win? in Turkish, which has also been a successful tactic used by TurkCell.

Some facts cited by Mr. Oglu: 18.2 million consumers total participated in the campaign, which Pepsi claims is the largest mobile campaign in the world to date.

The campaign saw a a 56 percent redemption rate for the special code printed on Pepsi cans.

The takeaway? Fast moving consumer goods mobile campaigns rock in Turkey.

The Pepsi PhotoCan campaign lets consumers get their photo uploaded via MMS to see themselves on the real Pepsi can. How cool is that?

Pepsi also claims that this was the largest user-generated mobile advertising campaign, with millions of cans produced.

The campaign targeted 500,000 18-25 years-olds from TurkCell?s opt-in database. The result was 400,000 pictures uploaded and a 14.5 percent click-through rate.

Pepsi also provided a glimpse of the summer 2009 campaign targeting housewives in Turkey with a text-to-win promotion with codes printed under the lid.

Pepsi sent out IVR messages from celebrities such as the Turkish Oprah. The campaign also included viral elements as ringback tones and wallpapers.

The mobile campaign achieved staggering results: 3.2 million unique participants and 21 million impressions via ringback tones.

?Turkey must be the mobile marketing paradise,? said Mark Wächter, global board member of the MMA. ?If your campaigns can?t make it there, they can?t make it anywhere!?

Mobile is sweet
Another big fast moving consumer good giant joined the stage: Vanderlei Rocque dos Santos, eBusiness leader at Nestlé, is keen on innovation and likes to inspire the delegates to take concrete actions toward creating standards.

Thomas Strerath, CEO of Ogilvy Group Germany, provided a great conclusion to the proceedings.

?The consumer is free-roaming like a cat with her own door to the house,? Mr. Strerath said. ?She decides when to play, hunt or just not do anything.

?If you disturb her in her roaming or whatever she is busy with ? this can hurt!? he said.

Brands have the task of entertaining people and to tell stories. So you better be relevant if you come close to the cat/consumer ? or else! Your brand might get scratched.

?Be clear what the goal is for the mobile campaign,? he said.

This cannot be downloads or clicks. This would not be a goal, but maybe a tactical step in whatever goal one is chasing. So be clear regarding what the offer is.

Mr. Sterath discussed brand-awareness campaigns from Siemens, Ford (augmented reality with quick-response bar codes), the award-winning Motorola Goodbye campaign and the speaking out-of-home poster from UNICEF.

Other campaigns included brand examples from IKEA, Fanta, American Express Mobile Concierge (70 percent more spending from people who use the service) and IBM (Wimbledon).

These are only some highlights of a better-than-expected MMF in Berlin.