With the 3GSM World Congress underway in Barcelona this week, there’s a lot of focus on mobile marketing. Successful and highly visible mobile campaigns from companies like Nike and Virgin have shown the viability of creative brand marketing to mobile handsets, without serving up spam.

One company at the forefront of mobile marketing is [tag]Enpocket[/tag],  one of a growing breed of hybrid agency/technology businesses that mash up marketing services with proprietary applications to deliver sophisticated and savvy campaigns. Typical agencies don’t have the engineering skills to provide a strong marketing platform, and typical engineering shops don’t have the marketing skills to serve up smart campaigns.  Enpocket seeks to bridge the gap, with a single-minded focus on mobile marketing.

In addition to creative campaign services, Enpocket offers technology for mobile advertising, promotional marketing, personalization, peer-to-peer mobile applications, behavioral analytics, and campaign management and reporting. Clients include Pepsi, Panasonic, Expedia and Snapple, while carrier partners include Sprint, Orange, Vodafone and Verizon.  

Engadget’s CEO, Mike Baker, has a useful article offering 10 Tips for Going Mobile over at the Mobile Marketing Association, a vendor-backed mobile industry group. I’ve been critical about the MMA in the past, because of their failure to stand up for mobile consumers on issues like spam. Ignoring the concerns of the consumers that form your market is not a wise bet for an industry group in a world of advancing social media. But this article by Enpocket is worth a read, as are some of the other materials on the MMA site. Too bad that in all the time the MMA has been around, they still can’t seem to come up with anything to say in their consumer section other than, um, “coming soon”.