The Seattle Times recounts some recent operator advertising schemes and the lessons learned. For the first seven months, Virgin Mobile’s Sugar Mama program, which offers users free minutes if they accept ads, has awarded 3 million minutes to about 250,000 users. While the current model may be about delivering the same ads to every user now, contextual ads are the end-game. Kevin Heisler, an analyst with Jupiter Research, is quoted as saying: “Even if they just do a small amount of targeting based on demographics, the conversion rates for campaigns will be astronomical compared to online advertising.”

Mobile search engine provider Medio Systems – also interviewed in the piece - is one of the most active in the place, creating a mobile search app to deliver ads based on individual user’s searches. “The convergence of having the biggest reach and most personalization promises this will be the most significant ad medium ever,” Omar Tawakol, Medio’s chief advertising officer, said.  Now that the mobile industry agrees on its modus operandi, it must figure out how to collect and distribute the contextual data to turn random pitches into one-to-one campaigns. (Sprint Nextel said it offers brands general information about its users, but added it stores the data on its servers and doesn’t give it to anyone – including the advertisers.) Who owns the data, owns the customer.