Phones, that is - not Alabama. According to AdAge, McDonald's, Masterfoods, Coca-Cola, Heineken, Timex are prepping summer dial-in campaigns, and adspend on mobile efforts is getting serious for some major marketers. The mobile phone is making headway as an advertising delivery system, with marketers' promotions consisting of mobile games to ring-tone giveaways and text-in trivia contests and sweepstakes.

"Mobile is no longer a new media - it has been tested and there is a protocol" for developing campaigns, Nihal Mehta, president and cofounder of ipsh!, a San Francisco-based mobile-marketing technology firm, is quoted as saying.

We might even see ad-supported TV channels soon. And the mobile Web just got its own domain suffix this week.

But hurdles still abound. An exec at a prominent package-goods firm agrees that mobile marketing is becoming more mainstream, but said brands are having trouble finding help: "Brands want to go to the agencies and the agencies should be out there. They're not, because they don't see the scale."