There’s a real buzz around mobile marketing and advertising right now. After almost a decade spent just beneath the radar of most brand managers and marketing budget controllers, there’s a sense that the real value of mobile as a marketing channel is finally starting to be appreciated.

I say this not simply because, like many in the industry, I want to see mobile on more marketing budgets, but because I am starting to see big, blue-chip brands embracing the medium in some clever and innovative ways.

Over the summer, Coca-Cola ran a campaign in the UK that gave away free bottles of Fanta, Sprite and Dr. Pepper to consumers using secure, digital mobile coupons. Over the course of the eight-week campaign, more than 200,000 drinks had been given away to almost 100,000 consumers across the UK, with the campaign delivering a remarkable redemption rate of 87%.

However, mobile advertising, as in third party brands using the channel for their advertising, is still at a very nascent stage. If you look at operators and their current mobile advertising impressions, reality is that, majority of them are operators selling their own services to subscribers.

In Turkey, Turkcell, one of the most innovative of mobile operators, sells tranches of talk time and texts to brands that they can use in sales promotion campaigns.

In one campaign for Pepsi, consumers were invited to text in to a Shortcode printed on cans of Pepsi. This was charged as one text message, but by texting in, they were guaranteed at least five credits, which equal two and a half texts or two minutes of talk time. The campaign generated 13 million texts from 1 million people in three months. This is a so-far rare example of a mobile network operator taking the lead in a mobile marketing campaign. There are not many others that spring immediately to mind, though of course, the Orange Wednesdays campaign, which was devised by Flytxt five years ago, is one of the best-known and most successful mobile customer loyalty campaigns.

So what part will network operators play in the future of mobile advertising? Currently to my mind, their role will be as big, or as small, as they care to make it. As a mobile network operator, you hold a lot of data on your customers – where they live, how much they spend on their phone each month, what sort of mobile internet sites they visit, and much more. Data protection rules, quite rightly, place restrictions on what the operators can, or rather cannot, do with this information in terms of sharing it with advertiser brands. But on a generic level, operators could use this information to display a specific ad when someone whose phone is registered or an address within a given postal area visits their mobile web portal. Or to serve one ad to all those aged 18-25 and a different one to those aged 45-55.

They could also take this a step further and reach out to every one of their subscribers, with a pitch that reads something like: ‘Are you willing to let us share some of your personal information with advertisers in return for a reward for doing so?’ This reward could be free talk time or texts, or a tie up with a partner company to offer other incentives such as discounts off magazine subscriptions or concert tickets.

Whether the operators have the will to do so is a moot point. Mobile marketing and advertising is not something that generates huge revenues for most mobile operators today. But the mobile, when handled properly, is potentially the perfect marketing channel that many of us believe it to be, and revenues could be huge in years to come. The operators that embrace it, like Turkcell, which at the last count had an opted in database of some 7.6 million - yes, 7.6 million – subscribers, will be those that reap the rewards.