Mobile advertising may be a hot topic, but few have really got their head around how to deliver it in such a way that it makes sense – and money – for the companies involved. The answer may have been there all along in the example set by print and cable companies that have built their bottom line on delivering advertising to a mass markets – cheaply and effectively. As Tom Wheeler, a managing director at VC firm Core Capital Partners, writes in his latest column on TMCnet: “Mobile advertising is a one-to-one operation, and as a result relatively costly to deliver.” Sending one message to mass audience (as is the practice in print and cable) costs “virtually nothing to deliver compared to the one-to-one unicast of mobile distribution.”

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Fortunately, the technology pieces are falling into place that will allow mobile operators to effectively broadcast advertising to their customer base on a “virtually costless basis.” The answer lies in a one-to-many multicast approach supported by technologies such as MediaFLO and DVB-H. In addition to video, mobile broadcasting technologies offer the potential for “datacasting” (the delivery on a one-to-many basis of a datastream containing information.

Taking this a step further Wheeler suggests datacasting would be a boon to mobile advertising. “Instead of sending the McDonald’s ad one at a time to mobile subscribers, why not send it once to everyone, cache it on the phone, and then let the network call it out of the cache as appropriate to be inserted into the content?” After all, he continues, this is exactly the way the local cable system does its local advertising. (At the appropriate time in the national network feed the locally stored ad is inserted and sent to all subscribers watching that channel.) “To make this work on mobile is a no-brainer with datacasting — it’s even possible once the ad is cached on the phone to insert the commercial which was delivered via MediaFLO or DVB-H into non-FLO or non-DVB-H programming.”

Granted, datacasting does cut some costs out of the equation. But it’s also quite a leap to assume mobile advertising can be similar to print and cable in the first place. The jury is still out on whether users won’t reject advertising as intrusive – and Wheeler doesn’t detail how mobile operators can ensure the ads are at least relevant to the content and apps (so they don’t blatantly appear as spam to the users who receive them). Sure, the network can call ads out of the cache as appropriate to be inserted into the content -  but that assumes the commercial-like ad message and model will prevail. (Highly unlikely if you look how empowered consumers are turning a deaf ear to advertisements and consuming content on their terms…) Indeed, more progressive companies tell me they are well aware the mobile phone is personal and so requires them to deliver advertising in tune with the individual’s profile, past preferences, browsing patterns and download history. It may be more cost-intensive but it may also pay off in the end.