Despite all their capabilities, mobile devices are still mainly used as phones. Our media strategies editor explains what that means for marketers.

Mobile marketing plays continue to be an important consideration -- if not the actual focus -- for a lot of companies looking for new ways to reach media-savvy audiences burned out by traditional advertising.

As we make our way through the second half of this first decade of the 21st century with equal parts communal paranoia and self-centered consumerism, getting up close and personal with marketing messages has never been more difficult or more important. Mobile represents marketers with a way to accomplish this like no other medium can.

Our mobile device -- for most people, that device is primarily a phone -- has become both a conduit for our access to the public sphere (and its access to us) as well as a highly personalized expression of our identity. We reach out with it; the outside reaches in. But we also take pictures with it and use those photos as "wallpaper" for our mobile screens; we set different ring tones for different people we know who call us, and each conversation with a friend is preceded by that friend's theme music when she calls.

There is a much longer essay in there somewhere about what our mobile device represents in terms of our identity, its effects on public life, social structure, et cetera. But apart from the implications of such findings, the device is an enviable platform for marketers to reach out and touch someone.

The advertising industry's discussions and use of mobile as a marketing messaging platform have focused on tactics like text messaging, WAP banners and even short-form video. These are all interesting and valuable, to varying degrees, depending on the product and the audience to which it is being propositioned.

But all of these are merely the messaging formats that are not endemic to the medium itself. Marketers have been looking at mobile as a way to replicate direct mail or online or TV advertising. The biggest opportunity the proliferation of mobile devices distributed throughout a mobile society offers is the tool's own primary killer application: its use as a phone.

As I mentioned in a previous column, Universal McCann in late August released the findings of a report that found the majority of Americans use their cell phones for making calls. Some 65 percent of those surveyed whose phones are internet-enabled still used those phones primarily for calling.

The opportunity for mobile is not how it can be used to conform to other formats of advertising, although this is certainly interesting and useful, but rather how it can be used as a phone for marketing.

What is the one thing that the urban nomad with a phone in his or her pocket needs more than anything else on a regular basis? Information. That information is frequently sought from directory assistance. But that costs a customer about $2 to use. How about having people listen to a brief message and then giving them the information they want for free?

1800Free411 is a company that offers this very thing. When a customer dials 1800Free411 and asks for a listing, he can receive a message for any number of goods and services, and is even given a means of responding to that message ("If you'd like X information sent to your phone, please press '1'"). Calling for a bar listing in a particular neighborhood? A movie studio can have a message running to promote any number of its movies playing in the area. To promote the new season of "Top Chef," Bravo had tune-in messages play any time someone called for a restaurant listing. Callers were asked if they wanted to be sent a text message to remind them when the show was on the following week.

Add to this the level of location-based messaging or geographic targeting, and you have all of the potential features of online; only you have it with a phone. And the phone doesn't have to do anything other than be a phone.

Those of us working in the online advertising or emerging media technologies space get too clever even for ourselves. In a quest to find (or create) the next new thing, we forget that some of the old things are perfectly capable of achieving our objectives without needing to be pushed beyond the pale of the established intention of their existence. Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe, and its best use is to smoke it.

Media Strategies Editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International, Inc., an Omnicom Company. Read full bio.