How to market across 300 channels? Find out at Mobile Summit

Brands seeking to distribute their message over mobile phones face an unbelievably fragmented world.

Gabe Leydon, CEO of Machine Zone — which has emerged as one of the largest gaming companies and now one of the largest mobile advertisers — counts 300 different channels.

Each of them has competing standards and protocols, and tracking real ROI is extremely difficult for a single channel, not to mention managing your campaigns across all 300. Leydon recently expressed extreme frustration with the advertising landscape and the lack of accountability that plagues it, and he ruffled plenty of feathers.

Above: Nicole DeMeo, Glispa

That’s why we’re devoting one of our deep-dive sessions at next week’s VentureBeat Mobile Summit in Sausalito, Calif. to how best to market across of these channels.

We’ve invited relevant experts to chair what promises to be a stimulating and thought-provoking conversation. One such chair is Nicole DeMeo, chief marketing officer of Glispa, which helps big companies market across large numbers of channels. Other chairs include Vinod Ramachandran, senior product manager of Google, and Tomer Cohen, director of product at LinkedIn.

Above: Vinod Ramachandran, Google

Here’s the marketing problem in a nutshell. An advertiser might start with buying ad words on Google to make sure that they get attention when people use Google’s search engine. But on mobile, where people are spending more of their time in apps, that advertiser may also want to put ads on large apps with networks. There’s Facebook, the largest app, but also Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat — which all have millions of users, and their own budding advertising networks — so brands may want to sprinkle some money on all of these, as well. I could go on. There are video ad networks like Vungle and Ad Colony, which are showing strong conversion rates because video is so compelling. And then there are at least a dozen other ad networks, from AppLovin to AppLift and Fyber, that can improve reach. And we haven’t even started talking about advertising directly on the big general content publishers like AOL or Yahoo, or on hundreds of more niche publishers.

Above: Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn

To prioritize, brands need to bring to the fore ROI considerations (native and other forms of advertising are showing strong conversion, for example), reach, and ease of use.

Learn more about this problem and how to solve it at the Summit, where our boardroom sessions offer deep dives with senior marketers and product and engineering executives. Other speakers at Mobile Summit include leading executives from Amazon, Pinterest, Lyft, Pandora, GrubHub, Touch of Modern, Runtastic, Kik, Zynga, Pocket Gems, AOL, and more.

We invite only 180 executives to the Summit (you can apply to attend here). It’s designed to be an intimate experience where top people in the field exchange strategies around some of the hottest trends in mobile — at a time when brands are having to move quickly to embrace instantaneous distribution. The goal is to make the Summit the best insider event, which is why it’s also free of influence from specific vendors or platform owners.

Leading vendors will be there, of course, but we prioritize brands and other independent app owners to create the best mix possible.

Working sessions go into depth on specific topic areas, and cocktail receptions make sure the networking juices flow.

Topics include the following:

• User acquisition
• Designing the user experience
• Messaging and video
• Mobile marketing automation
• Targeted marketing
• How to build your mobile marketing team
• How to orient an entire organization around mobile
• M-commerce and online-offline convergence
• Nurturing existing users
• Harnessing data for mobile engagement
• Mobile advertising attribution
• Predicting and measuring