I’m attending Advertising Week in NYC through Thursday and sat in on the Mobile Ad Summit today. Read on for the highlights from this event, details from an interesting session with Google Creative Labs, plus the tie-in to our world of digital images.

I go to these things all the time but most of the content is somewhat similar...

• Mobile is still in the experimental stage and not a line item in the budget of any major brands
• Only the iPhone offers the rich user experience that agencies are looking for, but that isn’t a big enough piece of the market yet to get anyone overly excited
• No one is getting rich, but many of the pilots are showing very promising results, certainly for high rates of engagement
• Mobile needs to be integrated as part of an overall campaign and not be an afterthought
• The ecosystem in the U.S. is highly complex; everything is interrelated
• The industry is still very much in a “learning mode” with the smart ones gleaning what they can from each campaign and not calling it quits
• Optimists believe that the tipping point occurred in 2009 with the iPhone and 3G networks
• The only handsets anyone seems to care about are iPhone, Android and Blackberry
• People under the age of 30 would rather give up their TV or PC before their mobile phone
• Oh, and, for those of you wondering… 2009 is NOT the year of mobile

Completely Switching Gears Now

The most exciting session I sat in on so far was two guys from the Google Creative Labs. They aren’t responsible for selling anything – rather just finding and developing cool stuff. They walked through their list of 87 Cool Things on the web. You really should check it out before they take the presentation down. You can find it at bit.ly/87coolthings. Yes, that’s really the web address. It’ll get you there. And, it will inspire and entertain you!

Oh, and what does all this have to do with digital images? With digital watermarks, you can make your images interactive! That means mobile phonesequipped with applications that detect and read digital watermarks can be used to enable all sorts of new and exciting experiences – maybe like those on the list of 87! Think about it.