Blyk is already planning the launch of an ad-funded MVNO aimed at youth markets. It’s well-funded and has some interesting people at the helm with lots of relevant experience, but it remains to be seen if the model works. Not because the user won’t accept the ads – that’s part of the deal – but because those ads may not be effective because the users will be so good at screening them out so the advertiser doesn’t get the anticipated click through rates. I should add there is an obsession that digital advertising is about clicks not branding and I believe it can be both).

Pitch.tv is also offering free mobile content in return for the permission to send you marketing messages and to run adverts on their content and community wapsites.

And Admob is making a very nice living from serving adverts to wapsites.

I agree that the mobile phone was and is designed as a peer to peer communications tool (i.e. talking and more recently texting) but it’s also evolving into a multi-media channel with the advent of the mobile internet, java applications and even Mobile TV (Sky here in the UK has 100,000 subscribers for mobile TV).

The key driver for take up of these multi-media services will be data costs. In India and South Africa the data costs are very low so wap browsing is much higher than in the UK where data charges are still too high (Three X-series and T-Mobile’s web ‘n walk packages excepted).

So for mobile marketing to work you need a mix of context (right place), content (right stuff) to the right person (where a profile might be relevant) in the right format (optimised for specific handset/network operator). Not an easy equation to get right. But we’re working on it.

Watch this space as they say.