How to Dominate at Mobile World Congress

Natalee Gibson
Managing Director

How to Dominate at Mobile World Congress

March 2, 2018

It’s been an exciting week for the MGP team. We just wrapped up Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2018, and we’re pleased to share some impressive highlights across the board for every client that attended. Here’s a quick snapshot of MGP’s MWC Barcelona week by the numbers.

Supported six clients at the show
Secured eight speaking opportunities for our clients
Facilitated more than 45 press and analyst meetings, resulting in 47 pieces of coverage this week with more to come
One GLOMO award win in the Best Connected Consumer Device category
Four Best in Show awards including TechCrunch, PCMag, Android Authority and IHS Markit
Mobile World Live Show Daily features for two clients
Celebrated MGP’s 10 year anniversary and launch of our new website with a dinner hosting some of our longtime journalist friends and colleagues

We’re proud of the client work we do, and we’re also very proud of the relationships we’ve nurtured with the GSMA and Mobile World Congress over the years. We take a very strategic approach to this event, as we recognize it is critical for any company in the mobile technology space. This is an event where we start the work early and drive hard, but it always pays off when our clients – no matter their size – make a big splash at one of the biggest annual global conferences.

Our work with clients means we never get to spend as much time listening to all the great session content at MWC as we’d like, but that doesn’t stop us from keeping our finger on the pulse of the show. This year, we saw several themes stand out:

Unless you’re under a rock, you know 5G was a critical theme for 2018. But what we found interesting is more than ever there was a focus on concrete deliverables – namely monetization. We watched the industry at large fumble 3G and 4G, and now there seems to be a prescient understanding that without proper monetization efforts there is little value in 5G. This is particularly critical on the enterprise side, as they will find far greater impact with the evolution of 5G than the consumer.

Speaking of monetization, it seemed to hang in the air all around us. We heard questions from the show floor around how operators can monetize new opportunities not just in a 5G landscape, but in IoT; how marketers can better monetize the mobile experience; how brands can monetize engagement in ways that brings value to the end user. Monetization vs. new technology always seems to be a chicken and egg question, but this year there seemed to be a consensus that technology without a monetization strategy is set up to fail quickly.

Artificial Intelligence was once again a hot topic, but this year it focused on how to drive value to the consumer. Amit Hammer, CEO of Neura took the main stage with Philips to discuss how the company is using Neura’s AI engine to better understand customers in the physical world, in order to offer more enlightened, personalized and relevant engagement in the digital world. One of the driving themes of AI this year was how imperative it is that companies use it intelligently to improve the customer experience and drive internal efficiencies.

Finally, mobile marketing played a big role at this year’s event with the first ever MWC CMO Summit – and our clients were front and center:

Kris Bondi, CMO of Neura and Jennifer Shambroom, CMO of YouAppi spoke to attendees about how to leverage your brand for mobile.
Jacquie Amacher, VP of marketing at Juvo shared valuable insights into how building a mobile identity can drive context and value for personalization and engagement.
Jennifer Kyriakakis, founder and VP of marketing at MATRIXX Software laid out the path to purchase for mobile users, and what telco operators can learn from the masters.

The role of marketing is changing dramatically in the face of mobile technology, and we’re excited to work with some of the best in the business doing innovative things to reach entirely new populations and revenue streams.

There is no question that Mobile World Congress is equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. We tip our hats to our great clients and congratulate them on their impressive success at the show. We’ll take just a day to recuperate from the madness before we turn our attention to propelling the MWC momentum forward for MWC Shanghai this summer and MWC Americas in Los Angeles this fall.