Marketers love big occasions. Product anniversaries, major holidays, national elections, the Olympics, the World Cup, the Super Bowl, and the Oscars all give marketers a platform upon which to engage and excite their customers. Even if a company doesn’t officially sponsor one of these events, marketers have figured out ways to draft off their momentum to garner attention.

The mobile marketing discipline is so new, as are most apps, that we don’t have much experience tethering our campaigns to these cultural milestones the way more mature industries do. We have a chance to change that, though, with an emerging annual event that is native to the mobile business.

I’m referring to the annual update of mobile operating systems.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft all are boosting their investments in making their mobile OS announcements major events. These announcements happen at the unveiling of new phones, tablets and wearable technology, but they also can occur at their developer conferences. Microsoft hosts its Build conference in April. Apple has its Worldwide Developer Conference. Google’s is called I/O. They attract thousands and sell-out fast.

Regardless of the timing or setting of their announcements, they all have in common one goal: to excite developers, journalists, industry analysts, and consumers about the latest features coming to the software that powers their devices. As mobile becomes more prominent, expect these events to attract more attention from the mainstream.

With all that focus on the backbone of the mobile experience, mobile marketers have a room service-like opportunity to trumpet their own offerings. That’s why OS announcements have become as important as any other event on your marketing calendar.

Think about how you can leverage these announcements for your mobile marketing efforts. It’s obviously an ideal time to increase exposure for your existing apps. It’s also an important window to engage the media and social media to share your Company’s vision for the future by revealing how you will embrace new OS features to make more powerful, useful, and entertaining versions of your apps.

In other words, not only is it important that you attend the event that is right for you. Seize upon the intensity of these events to steer some share of the hype they generate to your mobile marketing, too.

With the start of the New Year, begin your planning now.

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On the topic of major events, over half a million of us have watched director Michael Bay’s on-stage meltdown at CES. The combination of Bay’s celebrity, a company like Samsung, which hired Bay to sponsor a new TV, and a venue like CES makes this an unusual and spectacular implosion. I’ve planned and executed lots of events in my career, and as fiery as this one ended, I’m not surprised that it crashed and burned.

That’s because Samsung and Bay attempted to script a conversation between a Samsung executive and Bay. A teleprompter delivered their lines the way they do for news anchors. That may work for professional talking heads, but it’s really difficult to write a scripted conversation, and it’s harder still for most people to perform these lines in a way that doesn’t sound to the audience like a bad high school play.

It’s okay to have two or more executives on stage at major events. Just don’t try to write their lines. Instead, agree on talking points and rehearse relentlessly until everyone is comfortable with the milieu and content.