Lake Tahoe is amazing, and this year host of the MediaPost Mobile Insider Summit.

Beautiful scenery, surreal landscapes - fascinating, but at times frustratingly myopic talk about mobile.  

Lot's of very (x) people there, with x representing in fair proportions the brilliant, the smart, the forward (and unfortunately sometimes backward) thinking.  But truth be told, I have to ask -"Where were the brands?"

Here's the thing.  Things are beyond busy for us right now.  Since winning the ARF Great Minds award for ad-eff innovation back in December and as a result, brands have been increasingly reaching out to us.  We're also working on our 'super secret, prepare to be blown away game-changer' that I'm not able to talk about, but can say that it doesn't involve time travel, slimming down an entire size in just 1 week or really anything slappable or choppable.

But it's going to be hot - and it's going to be soon.

I digress, as any respectable ADD era evangelist might, from my original topic - MPMIS.  

I came to that show for a very straightforward reason. Brands I'm actively engaged with were on the 'some VIP attendees will include' portion of the Summit overview.  Now, in case you missed it, one clear takeaway from the summit was that the space is going in every possible direction at once.  I'm honestly surprised someone didn't pitch SMS based, in-app browser page email blasting with a DRM response component; it really is that fragmented of a space right now.

So I can't have my brands that I'm working with attending something like this, and not be in attendance - I can't have it, so we went.  But they (my aforeunmentioned brands), did not.

Some did, and I found their stories, (and some of their bizarre roundtable experiences) telling.  

Brands are in a tricky spot., they have what works for them - they have budgets for each of these and they have people with accountability.  Then they have the notion that they must engage in 'mobile', but every outlet for doing so is currently very busy telling them 'Do ours! The others are half-baked, or no, they are too baked and SO 2008'.

Chagrin.  Frustration.  Throughout the course of the Summit, I became cognizant of the idea that even we 'insiders' are still making sense of all this.

Case and point - 'Agents of change, 2011'.  Location: not mentioned.  AR: mentioned.  Really?

I've heard people's assertions that location based services aren't 'there' yet - but I'm here to tell you that they are in fact here, they are usable and they are amazing.

I'm not going to reveal a lot of trade secret stuff here, but I will say something obscure that a few people will get:

If I stand at the front door of your house and my phone says I'm standing across the street - the key to accuracy is telling my app 'I'm at the front door of your house' and letting rather elementary approaches like differential equations do the rest.  

Hence, I'd caution that especially in mobile, often the difference between what can and cannot be accomplished is who your innovators of choice are.

It's so important to understand that mobile consists of a few different groups;  only a small portion of people have figured out the tough stuff over in one group, meanwhile another group is saying that it hasn't in fact been figured out so why bother, and yet another seems that it just wants to port the web over to mobile because they don't want to lose traction to mobile and don't understand that everything that has a browser doesn't have to be a 'browser medium'.

I watched as one poor brand had an entire group of folks try to 'school' them on what and what not to do in mobile - each from a very partisan viewpoint and none listening to the simple replies of 'and...how?; or really trying to understand the actual challenges their brand faces.  Later in conversation, I heard someone mention that this brand was just sloughing off every bit of very valuable insight.

I heartily disagree.  Brands are a moving train with precious cargo.  There are many tracks they could take, many configurations they could move forward in - but at the end of the day, successful brands ~ are so ~ for a very good reason.  They aren't just going to jump on another bandwagon e.g. the WWW, and it's OUR job to help pave the way.  

People talk about how great of a medium web is, and I don't disagree except in a few key areas - areas that I was astonished nobody mentioned - except me.

The web's core measurement methodologies are still unstable and filled with holes.  

Do you really know who you are having a conversation with?  Really?  Sure, if you've collected data on them and they provide that data during every interaction, and don't (as 30% do), delete their cookies.  Mobile web is simply desktop web with a far smaller screen.  It doesn't display particularly well, has problems supporting various technologies and has tremendous difficultly being measured.

Take the important web metric, the page view.  Most WAP browsers display the entire page, albeit tiny, from the very first invocation of a URL.  So this is a page view?  What if the person finger drags, or double taps one part of the page into view, and none of the other parts?  That's a...what?

Having nearly 10 years in digital audience measurement, our term for this is an 'unstable metric'.  We haven't even talked about audience differential.  Is your web audience in addition to your mobile audience?  Are they the same people?  How do you know for sure?  

And, don't you just have to know for sure?  

People failed to discuss uniqueness - at this event.  It was a bit flooring, truth be told and the reason is simple.  Web has NO true uniqueness, and incidentally, that's by design.  You aren't supposed to be able to know who you are talking to, it's supposed to be anonymous for the most part, at least that's what our founding fathers at CERN, etc., had in mind.

Mobile web - at least on iPhone and other platforms - are disconnected from the devices capabilities such as telemetry, device id, etc.  You cannot get at device id for instance, on the iPhone using ANY KNOWN HTML OR SCRIPTED COMPONENT.  Shame on whomever at MPMIS was spreading the rumor that you can.  You find a way to do it?  By all means, call me out - hell, I'll take you to lunch and apologize right here on this very blog.  But considering that IP addresses aren't unique to a device and that on mobile 3G carriers your IP address can fluctuate dramatically - mobile web is actually considerably more difficult to measure.

And everyone just sort of skirted around this topic and what it means to mobile.  Uniqueness is HUGE and when combined with other device capabilities it becomes the secret sauce to a lot that wasn't talked about at MPMIS.  Except amongst a few.

Apps, while they might not be the panacea for every brand, have so much more potential than WAP on nearly every measurable axis.  The biggest claim I'll make right here and now is:

Apps give brands the capability of being nearly omnipresent in their consumers lives and position the brand in the purse and pocket of those consumers.

Yeah, that's right - 'purse and pocket' - get to know the term because you heard it here first, and the concept is going to be huge.  Ahem, just remember it's mine. ;)

And now ,let the concept sink in for a moment because you'll never get it using WAP.  

Let's say you are an amazing brand with great market share and you decide to go WAP.  Good for you, any move in mobile is better than no move.  So great, you are a PULL implementation on WAP, effectively silent and motionless unless the consumer very specifically invokes you.  So then even with your great e-mobile WAP site, another brand comes along and they aren't as big, but they create some lasting, reusable value for consumers and place it in an app.  Advertising aggressively, they become the #1 app in your brand's sector.  

You just lost a big part of that game in mobile - it's not likely you will get a second chance without copying whatever it is that they did.  Your WAP site will sit there, a pull only mechanism while your competitor enjoys the capability to reach out and connect to the consumers nearly any time they wish.  If they truly did their job right this communication will be FREE and WELCOMED by the consumers.

So here you are, silent and waiting for your WAP site to be invoked - meanwhile you can measure the effort, but know that its prone to as yet unsolved methodology hurdles, you can't reach them on demand - *sigh*, it's sad just to think about it.

At the end of the day racefans, it's all about 'Mobile Strategy AND Insights', which means covering ALL the bases.  Which road to go down in Mobile?  All, at least until it's clear through expert due diligence that particular paths are not the right moves.  You'll get that guidance from folks who understand that it could be an app + SMS + WAP that is the required mix, or it could be something else.

Would I attend another 'Insider Summit'?  Actually yes, I would, because it's great to know that you don't really have much competition - plus the people there were truly amazing folks and all extremely sociable and intelligent.  And I love it when people are open to healthy debates, the Summit provided lots of that.  The staff and crew of event were very nice, and the event had some great highlights and truly, some very intelligent people.

And ultimately, I made new contacts and new friends.  That's important regardless of the business you're in. 

I'll close by saying something simple and straightforward; If you are talking to people in mobile who have a 'this particular way is THE right way' versus other potential approaches - show them the door, pronto.  There are plenty of us out here looking at the bigger picture.

Are you?