This morning at the NAA MediaXchange Rishad Tobaccowala gave a provocative keynote session on the future of marketing and advertising and how traditional media companies must leverage new platforms to more effectively serve advertising to customers.

As the Chief Innovation Officer of Chicago-based Publicis Group Media, Rishad is one of the most influential thinkers in the North American advertising industry. It is therefore no surprise that the audience was on the edge of their seats listening intently to Rishad`s advice.

We at Spreed found his talk very interesting considering many of his recommendations push newspapers in the direction of a number of the products and services that we provide (mobile platforms, mobile advertising, location based advertising, etc).

Rishad left with 10 recommendations for newspapers to follow in the future that we would like to share here:

1. Be schizophrenic – Only the schizophrenic will thrive. Run two or more business models at the same time but make sure they are very separate. Do not make a big mesh of all your models.
2. Embrace technology – Tech is the new magic. Make sure the follwing ive things are done by the end of this week.
   1. Use an RSS reader and start following your passions through it
   2. Get a Twitter account
   3. Get on Facebook
   4. Get on Foursquare
   5. Go to someone in your company who is younger (probably 2-3 levels below you) and make them your mentor. Take them outside of the company every two weeks and get them to teach you about what is new and upcoming
3. Embrace the blur – Church and state are too separate within news organizations. All elements of a news organization (sales, editorial, technology) need to work together in the same group.
4. Learn fast, iterate faster, make mistakes and don’t be afraid to fail.
5. Do a massive outreach to young people – You want to make the industry exciting. Don`t be swamped with old people. Get youngsters into the industry.
6. Think about what curating, combining and editing really is
7. Platforms – Every company needs a platform strategy. How do you attract new partners? What’s your device strategy (iPad, iPhone, etc)? What’s your search strategy?
8. Make sure that you celebrate the software and technology folks at your organization. Don’t hide them in a room somewhere even if they are strange. Tell them about the business and ask them to solve business issues
9. Think about  the future of your organization. Thank about your organizational design, incentives, benefits, etc.
10. This one was a bit odd and I am not sure exactly what he meant by it, but the industry is not anyone but you. there is not industry but yo, embrace the “muchness”. “This is my dream and I am going to decide how it ends”

More exciting news today/yesterday on the heels of the Mobile World Congress; Microsoft has allowed a few reporters/bloggers to play with their new Windows Mobile 7 platform. To say that I am surprised is an understatement. Some of you may remember a post I wrote a short while back about Google’s Android and Chrome OS being a bigger threat to Microsoft than to Apple; this recent news makes me rethink my position. This operating system is without a doubt beautiful and well thought out from the ground up. The question now is will they be able to inspire developers around the world to begin building apps for this now? I need to get my hands on a device soon so that I can assess whether Spreed should be earmarking Windows Mobile as a viable platform to build on. I will not making any overarching reviews until then, but from what I can see in these videos, this is a pretty unique and mature mobile environment. Check it out for yourselves and let us know what you think.

Check out even more pics and videos at Gizmodo here

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So the iPad was just officially announced by Steve Jobs and overall sentiment online has been mixed. I am going to reserve my judgement until I have actually placed my eyes and hands on the device myself. However, I do want to point out that this device or one similar to it is going to completely revolutionize the PC industry.

A few posts back I talked about the impending mobile OS wars and the future of the PC industry. The launch of the iPad proves that this movement is very real and that we are going to see more of these in the near future.

What does this all mean for newspapers and media companies? Well, we saw two media demo’s today. The first was from MLB who always do a spectacular job with their interactive technology innovations. If anyone is on the cusp of making ipTV attractive for the masses it is the MLB. more importantly though was the demo from the New York Times.

Here at Spreed we are very focused on the newspaper industry and as such the iPad is a very interesting platform  for us. The NYTimes demo showed off a great looking app that really took advantage of the entire form factor to replicate and enhance the traditional newspaper experience. I love how they have integrated videos and galleries seamlessly into articles and how users can get a snapshot of every article in todays newspaper through one view.

In addition this is a much smarter platform for newspapers and magazine publishers in comparison to the Kindle. For a good year now I have been saying that the Kindle is okay, but it doesn’t satisfy the needs of readers and advertisers. The Kindle is black and white and not interactive from a media stand point. The iPad completely satisfies these holes left by the Kindle. It can do everything a Kindle can, but displays everything in color and lets people really interact with the content (a must for online advertisers these days).

Mobile platforms are exciting and there is loads of potential for innovation. Spreed is definitely going to be playing around with the iPad and helping our clients embrace this new platform. However, we suggest everyone be cautious and make sure that they understand each platform before they move onto the next one. Make sure you can sell at least some of your existing mobile inventory on your iPhone, Blackberry and Android apps before you start sinking big money into an iTab edition of your paper.

I look forward to getting my iTab and sharing my first hand findings with  you all. Please feel free to call or email me with any questions about this new platform and what it means for your organization.

Last week Mobile Marketing Watch posted an interesting article summarizing some stats from a recent DM2PR and Quattro study. I’ll let you read the article for yourselves, but the general premise is that very few people tested out mobile apps in 2009. However, those that did saw great results and as such many more marketers are planning on embracing an app strategy with the iPhone being the platform of choice.

Development and Overall Use of Apps to Skyrocket in 2010

The study indicated that many marketers took a “wait and see” approach in 2009 in terms of a mobile app strategy, stating fewer than one-half of marketers created either a mobile or social app in 2009.  Most of those surveyed plan to invest in a mobile app this year, however, with the iPhonebeing the platform of choice, followed by Android.

We had a tremendous year at Spreed, with the support of our partner digital media properties, successfully launching mobile apps to millions of mobile consumers. Whether setting in motion trial experiments, producing first-of-a-kind mobile apps in the market, or acting as sub-contracted developers with end-to-end service delivery expertise, we were able to accelerate our partners’ time-to-market on all mobile media platforms. In doing so, we rapidly delivered certified mobile app downloads, exponentially improved media property pageviews and significantly increased advertising revenues for them, especially when benchmarked against 3rd party builds currently in the market.

For example, some of our most notable successes were:

The launch of The Globe and Mail, Metro News Canada (1st Bilingual mobile app featured by Apple), Sing Tao News (largest Asian market newspaper in Canada), Guardian Media, Scripps’ GoVols mobile sports app for the University of Texas and more.

This resulted in:

• Cumulatively spawning millions of page views per month per app while driving new mobile media brand and revenue opportunities for each.
• Some mobile apps now are attracting more page views per month than on their branded Internet websites; with loyalty to the brands and mobile apps extremely high on a daily basis.
• Some partners seeing more than 2% CTR’ s on ad campaigns ran and sold by their in-house sales teams; as well as upwards of $15 average CPMs for mobile ad sales — much higher than industry norms for these premium media properties.

With proven successes like these in the market, along with our proprietary service delivery innovations for mobile analytics and advertising at Spreed, it is with complete confidence that we believe that our partners will significantly increase pageviews and revenue streams from their mobile media properties in 2010.

We are going to make a major push in 2010 to share our industry findings with everyone. Please keep coming back and do not hesitate to contact me at dave[at]spreedinc[dot]com if you have any questions about building or monetizing mobile apps.