MWC-is-a-coming: Introducing our new MWC advice series

Don’t be put off by the current hoopla taking place in Las Vegas at CES right now. Mobile World Congress is most definitely the daddy of the mobile event calendar.

For quite some time now I’ve been attending lunches, evening briefing sessions and participating in teleconferences discussing the Barcelona event. Most of the time I’ve been dispensing the benefit of my hard-earned wisdom from the point of view of a niche-media player.

I’ve spent my time describing how most of the mainstream media journalists I know operate at the event (fly in for one day — two days max — visit a few Big Players, spend 20 minutes with a Big Player CEO and then knock out a post over lunch. Wine, wine, food, plane, back to London).

I’ve described how best to attract the attention of a niche media player (get to know them BEFORE the event), how to plan meetings with media (BE FLEXIBLE) and how to deal with the square-footage (comfortable shoes, seriously).

I’ve also learnt about the expenditure. In one lunch briefing I spoke at, attended by some of the Big Enterprise Players, I asked how much they’d probably spend at the event. There was silence around the room before one of the attendees said, “Ok, I’ll give you an indicative figure. We’ll spend about £850k.”

I thought that was quite a lot, before someone else emboldened by the first attendee’s statement spoke, “We’ll spend at least £1.3m.”

Again, I thought that was rather a lot. Especially in the context of sponsoring Mobile Industry Review for the entire period.

“Oh, well since we’re being honest,” said another participant, “We’ll spend upwards of $8 million dollars.”

“On a FOUR DAY event?” I asked, rather incredulous.

“Yes, easily. Hotels, entertainment, transport, logistics, the party, the stand… easily $8 million.”

Now then.

When you’re competing with that level of expenditure, getting your strategy right is rather important.

Which is why I sat down with Dominic Pannell from Buzz Method the boutique communications agency last month. I asked Dominic to put together a series of articles featuring his suggestions along with commentary from around the industry regarding best practice to approaching MWC. I’ll also ask him to introduce his agency to later on.

But it’s time now to publish the first of the Seven Steps to MWC Show Success — this piece features a contribution from Lee Brooke, Director of Communications at mobile giant, Nokia.

It’ll be live in just a moment.