What stood out to me at the AMA's MPlanet Pre-Conference Networking Immersion Experience in the exhibit hall:

1. nifty green and gray messenger-style conference bags
   
2. free sushi
   
3. liquor drinks at the open bar (no drink tickets required)
   
4. acrobats on pogo stick stilts (we're at Disney's Dolphin hotel)
   
5. a bar carved from melting ice
   
6. free sushi

Also I really dug the 2 free books I scored:
Advanced Email Marketing by Jim Sterne
Boom (Marketing to baby-boomer women) by Mary Brown and Carol Orsborn

Ok now that the glitz and glamor is out of the way here's who I talked with the most tonight.

Fleishman-Hillard Inc.
First let me give you the Fleishman-Hillard Inc. rundown. These are the folks who put this conference together.

Rachelle J. Lacroix: blogger relations manager who contacted Jason in the first place. She's a conference blogger's best friend.

Tim Powers: Vice President. He listened patiently while I elaborated on how I like to have long conversational interviews and that MarketingShift's about popping-fresh scoops. We also spoke briefly about his early tech PR work in the Bay area in '94.

Rich Jernstedt, CMO, Executive VP, Senior Partner. He loaded me down with research and gave me the Boom hardback book co-written by Carol Orsborn, PhD who newly joined the company.

If the speakers are as rich and informative as the networking event we should have a pretty good conference on our hands here - nice work so far folks.

Maritz
I spoke at length with lanky Scott Bush, CMO, Maritz and first cousin of George W. Bush. He gave me a sneak preview of the presentation he's giving on Friday - he says it's all new material so if you've seen him present before you will be sure to learn something new.

If memory serves he'll be digging in on customer experience and employee engagement - how the transparency of the web makes the 4 p's of marketing obsolete. But for Fortune 1000s. I'll be interviewing him for MShift before long.

ATT U-Verse
ATT has a new box for delivering IP TV called the u-verse. And they had a parked ice cream truck in the exhibit hall to give away ice cream and tell people about their San Antonio roll out.

When they found out I was press they referred me to the San Antonio tech blogger who tested their product, turned into an evangelist for it and has become such an authority on their product that he's hired to speak at conferences.

iCentera
My conversation with iCentera started when I asked Craig M. Dembeck, SVP about their slogan - portals for mortals. All portals are for mortals obviously, so after we'd cleared that up I learned that what they mean is portals that anyone can build without being skilled in web design and development.

They have an impressive roster of clients and 7 different AppExchange tie ins. I tried to grill Craig on why there was no social networking but they had just two days before added a forum-esque functionality along with internal emails and chatting.

A nifty overall product run by people smart enough to build in the AppExchange environment.

What's Next
For me what's next is bed because I've got to stay fresh all the way to the Keynote Address by Sam Palmisano, Chairman and CEO of IBm-fingM at 6:30.

Mobile advertising continues to be small potatoes today, but analyst firm ABI Research has faith that after a decade of hype, it still has great potential.

ABI Research says that mobile ads will produce $1.9 billion in revenue globally this year, or less than five percent of U.S. TV ad dollars. But analyst Ken Hyers says the fact that mobile phones are used by a single person gives them unique capabilities as receptacles for ads. Ads on mobile phones get more than 10 times the click through rates of web banner ads, according to the company.

To realize this potential, phones must be used for web browsing at much higher rates than today, and the tracking techniques for identifying users and matching them to the information that carriers keep about their customers will have to be advanced.

Geolocation, where ad networks know where you are standing and deliver the most relevant ads based on your interests will have the greatest influence over the success of mobile advertising.

Mobile advertising has been purportedly on the verge of breaking out since the days of the first PlayStation, so skepticism of the medium is deserved. I also believe that the ubiquity of free WiFi and connected laptops/mobile devices reduce the need to use phones as "the" information source while on the go.

TiVo needs advertising revenue to survive and is now asking customers to watch long form ads. Subscribers can choose to watch "Program Placement" ads when they are in the process of deleting programs.

TiVo says that since the ads don't run within the program they don't have to share the ad revenue with the media companies, according to Reuters. That won't help them to gain the support of the media companies that are their essential partners, so I'd recommend that they give a token amount back to the program providers. TiVo can target ads to particular shows and track their performance, so they need to throw the networks a bone in hopes that they might want to buy into the system.

The company has lined up several national advertisers including Burger King that will run ads up to 2 minutes in length. This puts a hefty burden on the creative agencies to come up with killer spots. Filling several minutes that go beyond "we sell burgers and fries" is no simple chore.

DVRs are changing the rules of the game -- advertisers can no longer throw together spots and expect millions of people to pay attention. Advertising needs to be content and compete with programs in terms of quality, which given what we see during prime time shouldn't be so tough.

I'm down in FLA to cover the mPlanet conference with... HOW DID YOU GUESS?? Jason Dowdell.

We had dinner tonight at his house and I drew a picture of his daughter as a ballerina princess with a monster mask on. You had to be there.

Tomorrow night I will be visiting the mPlanet mixer and Thursday blogging and video taping at the conference. I'm most excited to see the CMO of ING direct as well as Chris Anderson of the long tail.

This post was a test by the way.

Sometimes there are business ideas that are so bizarre and pitiful that they take your breath away.

For example, PricePlay.com is a startup where you play interactive games, and the better you score on the game, the better your price on goods you've selected.

Now if these games were challenging, fun, and exposed players to lots of relevant ads, this would make sense. But to make a game of putting clothes (including pimp attire) on Santa with no ads to save a few dollars on goggles can cause you to vapor lock.

Wasting even five minutes on a game to get a better price (especially when the prices aren't remarkable) is five minutes you'll never get back again. Price shoppers want to save time and money, and I can't see how PricePlay will generate enough sales to warrant the game development or bandwidth if they ever got volumes of traffic to happen, which is as likely as me finding a Lamborghini under my tree this year.

If this company gets venture capital, it will be the final proof that we are recklessly investing like it's 1999.

YouTube has hooked up with erizon to deliver videos to mobile phones. Verizon Wireless customers will be able to access a "sampling" of YouTube videos from their mobile phones for a limited time. VCast customers who pay $15 a month for the service will get access to some of the most popular videos

This is the first test that could reveal Google's long term strategy for mobile video content. Limiting the test to paying customers could indicate that Google is favoring a pay-for instead of ad-supported model.

The other problem is bandwidth. Even if just a small fraction of the YouTube audience pays for only the bits that are delivered to their phones, the mobile networks could experience a severe bandwidth crunch.

So now in addition to the people who have arguments on their phones and disrupt the public, we'll also have people guffawing loudly at videos of idiots falling down or otherwise harming themselves. All the more reason to stay at home.

User generated video and the YouTubers of the world are en vogue today, but the hype has probably surpassed the long term economic value of watching content created by the average Joanne.

Corporate America has slowly started to warm to the "industry" through acquisitions and by making capital for startups such as Break.com, and companies have started to offer people instant fame (and sometimes cash) for creating videos about their products.

For example, Atom Entertainment is expanding its UGV section and has added Blinkx' search technology. The NFL and Doritos have teamed up for a contest where the best UGV's will be shown during the SuperBowl, the most-watched program of the year.

As I've said before, the people who create the videos that generate the traffic deserve to be compensated for their work, but some part of me believes that corporate contests will diminish the creativity and spontaneity that has driven the success of YouTube. As artists in many fields will tell you, there is a difference between creating something for yourself that you hope is interesting to others, and trying to appeal to a mass audience and making money.

Just as reality TV and game shows were "it" for a short time, the fascination with user generated content has probably reached its zenith and will start to fade. UGV isn't going away, but it may never be as popular again with Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley as it is today.

WalMart and its public relations firm Edelman are taking heat for running a blog that pretends to be a grass roots website. As detailed by MediaPost, Edelman staffers write the blog posts and the company does not make it obvious who is running the show.

On the About Us page of Working Families for Wal-Mart, it states that the organization "is a group of leaders from a variety of backgrounds and communities all across America." Yes, Edelman does have offices "all across America," but that's not exactly telling the truth.

Edelman has been suspended from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and could be expelled for running the website.

There will always be organizations that use phony grassroots (or Astroturf) campaigns to try and fool consumers into believing that the campaigns are viral, but usually it is not organizations as well known as WalMart and Edelman. As with the "video news releases" that are passed of to news organizations, most of the time the truth will come out, and the companies pay the price in negative press. The critics of the blogosphere have made it more difficult to fool consumers, giving marketers even more reason to stop.