I really enjoyed participating on a panel about mobile advertising at DMA Mobile Marketing Day last week.  Congratulations to Mickey Alam Khan from Mobile Marketerfor organizing a terrific event for the Direct Marketing Association. Having recently attended a few digital and mobile media events with a visibly thinning audience-- due economy not diet-- I was pleased to see a large conference room full of participants from Fortune 500 and midsize companies.  I was glad to find many familiar faces of mobile execs from Jumptap, Quattro, Millennial, ChaCha, Bango, Nielsen, iLoop, and other players of the mobile advertising value chain. While some in the audience were new to mobile, most were direct response marketers who have already implemented successful mobile campaigns and came to network with their colleagues and learn some new tricks of trade. My panel was about driving consumer engagement through mobile advertising. For me, it was interesting to see how the questions betrayed the direct response nature of the audience: How does one measure engagement in mobile? How do you get a mobile user to buy things? How do I track users across online and mobile?  How does one integrate Click-to-Call into a mobile Web campaign? The panelists agreed that relevance and creative were the key to driving consumer engagement. In this, mobile offers some unique benefits that allow ads to be more compelling than traditional advertising:  location awareness (maybe not now but eventually), built-in payment mechanism, high level of measurability, and “always-with-you” characteristics.  Let’s not forget it’s also a phone. You can make phone calls. Clicking on a banner to call a car dealer to schedule an appointment, isn’t it the ultimate goal of engagement marketing?  Users calling ChaCha to ask tax questions receive highly relevant H&R Block ads. As for creative implementation, taking advantage of opportunities to fill “dead time” allows marketers to engage consumers into interacting with a brand more often and in more compelling ways than in traditional media: interactive quizzes,  timely polls, and multi-player advergames. AdMob and Crisp Wireless take advantage the iPhone ‘s dazzling screen and touch capabilities to deliver rich media ad units that integrate video into advertising banner and allow consumers to truly interact with the brand. 2009 may or may not be the "year of mobile advertising," but if this audience was any measure, it will surely be the year when mobile becomes an integral and necessary part of nearly every advertising spend. See more buzz from DMA Mobile Marketing Day on Twitter.