By Ty Wang, Oracle

As the holiday shopping season comes to a close, recession worries have turned all eyes to the retail sales numbers for some signs of hope. Retailers have gone to great lengths to boost numbers this year with everything from deeper discounts and extended Black Friday prices to high-profile commercials and online advertising and, more significantly than any previous year, mobile advertising and marketing campaigns.

The rise of mobile advertising and marketing is a confluence of several factors including the proliferation of mobile phone use, especially smartphones, and the increased willingness of consumers to receive or respond to mobile ad messages. In particular, when it comes to shopping, more and more consumers are using their mobile phones, whether researching prices or receiving and using mobile coupons. Deloitte’s annual holiday survey found that 19 percent of U.S. consumers older than 18 planned to use their mobile phones to assist in holiday shopping this year, which is more than double last year’s results. Mobile couponing is one of the growing ways consumers plan to use their phones. The Yankee Group predicts that mobile coupon redemption will increase in North America from $5 million in 2009 to $62 million in 2010.

And it’s not just the holidays. Mobile advertising and marketing has been on the rise throughout the year and experts expect it will continue through 2010 and beyond as more companies are reallocating marketing budgets to online and mobile outlets. Gartner estimates that mobile advertising will be a $13 billion business globally by 2013.

Due to my work in the communications industry, when reading and hearing about the excitement around mobile advertising, I can’t help but ask the question many have asked over the years about innovation relating to the communications industry — what will the network operators do? Surely they won’t sit here and let this revenue pass them by.

Mobile advertising presents a similar challenge as mobile content, where the network operators have seen their customers acquire 18 percent of their mobile content off-deck. However, the mobile ad industry is still nascent and operators still have plenty of opportunity to stay relevant. To maintain a spot in this lucrative value chain, operators must leverage their unique characteristics — including ownership of key customer data like usage patterns and location and presence info across multiple screens, value-added capabilities inherent with network ownership and the existing revenue relationships. Further, with all the mobile ad aggregators out there, operators must make themselves attractive business partners for advertisers by providing easy-to-use tools for accessing and using valuable subscriber data to deliver targeted marketing campaigns and track their results. Only network operators have access to the detailed usage patterns, as well as location and presence information that could be so valuable to advertisers. And, with growing mobile subscriber bases, operators can provide advertisers with a large, but highly targeted reach. Due to network operators’ history of reliable service delivery, their ability to deliver visibility into execution and conversion of targeted marketing campaigns seems well within reach.

With the right tools, mobile advertising could be just the gift network operators have been looking for to fill the gap in decreasing voice revenues. What do you think? Do you have plans to implement a mobile advertising program? What challenges are you facing? I look forward to hearing from you.

Happy holidays to all ...

Ty Wang is senior director of product marketing for service delivery solutions at Oracle Communications. He is responsible for identifying new product capabilities and market opportunities for communications service providers and related independent solution providers and oversees areas of Oracle expansion including voice over IP (VoIP), presence, messaging and Web 2.0 technologies for initiatives ranging from social networks to mobile work forces.