Five Must-Have Mobile Apps For Media Buyers and Advertising Account Managers

Keynote - Apple ($9.99) iPad/ iPhoneKeynote may very well be the best professional app on the market.  Exclusively available via Apple products, create PowerPoint worthy presentation including animation. Use full-screen view to present right from your iPad instead of a laptop.  I tried it but don't recommend using the app for the smaller screen devices like iPhone, or iPod touch. Keynote also syncs with Apple's iCloud, keeping the latest draft of your presentation available from any device.

BizXpenseTracker - Expense, Mileage & Time Tracking - Silverware Software ($5.99) iPad/iPhone

Expense much? BizXpenseTracker is your digital personal assistant.  The name is a little funky but the app is simple and seamless.  Just create a trip title and begin inputting your expenses.  The app will help you categorize them appropriately.  Add photos of all the receipts and they are as good as a scanned copy. No need to clutter your purse and longer. Toss all those lose receipts in the garbage. All the data is stored and filed under the name of the trip.  When its time to submit an expense report you can export to Excel via email or to a Dropbox account which also provides a file back-up which you can access from anywhere. One other cool feature is optical character recognition which (in theory) can convert the photos of your receipts into digital text and (again, in theory) pre-fill the expense form. This technology is still in its infancy but doesn't take away from the app.

Nomina - Outspring, Inc. ($4.99) Android/ iPad/ iPhone

This trusty little app was made for the integrated marketing creative professional in mind.  It does all your dirty work for you. It instantly researches the availability of any trademark or tradename in a variety of contexts. Let's say you and your team are brainstorming and have this incredible idea to brand your clients organic line of goats milk chocolate pastries: Baa Baa Black Sweets.  Nomina will tell you if it’s available on commonly used web domains (.com, .net, org) as well as instances of it in Google, USPTO, common law libraries, and even Apples' App Store. Pretty cool right?

Evernote - by Evernote (Free) Android/ iPhone/ iPad

If Google is designed to organize the world's information, this is the filing cabinet.  Evernote syncs your notes across all of the devices you use. Highly regarded as one of the must-have mobile apps, Evernote hyper-organizes you life.  Before discovering Evernote, this personally was a huge challenge for me.  I had notes posted on my Gmail Tasks, Notes Everything app on my Android device and the stock note app on my iPod.  No longer.  Evernote organizes notes, photos, tasks lists, and makes light work of voice reminders.  Add tags and easily find them later.

Marketing Forecast - Ad-ology (Free) iPad/iPhone/ Android

This is one of the few apps designed for the advertising and marketing industries.  Utilizing consumer insight and marketing news from Ad-ology Research, Marketing Forecast aggregates all the industry news direct to your mobile device.  Get your daily dose via the Current Buzz tab and stay ahead of economic trends. A perfect app for a advertising executives, brand managers, small business owners and consumer analysts.