New MMA president details mobile marketing roadmap

After a five-month search, the Mobile Marketing Association appointed former Nuance Communications executive Mike Wehrs as its new president and CEO. Wehrs, who succeeds Laura Marriott as president, will lead the MMA’s 720 member companies spanning 40 countries in building up mobile marketing at a time when budgets are tighter than ever. Wehrs’s background includes vice president roles at speech and predictive text provider Nuance, AOL’s Tegic Communication before Nuance acquired it and Microsoft’s mobile and embedded devices division. Wehrs has also been on the board of directors and executive committees of the CTIA, Open Mobile Alliance, Bluetooth Special Interest Group and dotMobi Advisory Group. He spoke with Associate News Editor Sarah Reedy about the challenges and changes in the upcoming year in mobile marketing.

On familiarizing consumers with mobile ads: As mobile marketing starts to be something that people are seeing more frequently on their cell phone, especially in the US, it tends to be a phenomenon the masses have not identified with yet. Questions are arising: How do I control privacy? How do I opt in or opt out to a service? If I get an ad I don’t like, what’s my recourse; who do I tell? This is something the MMA Website has enabled for some amount of time, but it’s not been a highlighted feature area. Now we’ve reached this point of maturation and awareness in the general population that we will be working with end consumers to interact with the MMA in a cooperative fashion to ensure the information is used in manners they understand and they have the ability to opt in and manage privacy components of their relationship with their carriers and service providers.

On diversifying the MMA’s services: Right now, we’ve been handling mobile marketing forums, having membership dues, a small component of educational and seminar activities, but there’s also a significant amount of intellectual capital in the MMA that has not been productized or made available in any scale way, and that is the kind of thing I’ll definitely be bringing about some changes to – how to have educational programs, marketing programs and things of that nature.