One of the most basic marketing questions about an emerging platform is whether anyone really is advertising there yet. Mobile marketing companies love to drop big brand name partners on me as if the two companies were best buds going way back. It is more likely that the high profile advertisers sloshed a few drops of R&D money the marketer's way when it was "testing mobile."

At the risk of revealing too much about my media-addicted ways and permanently embarrassing my family, I will say that I'm the kind of guy who reaches for the remote in movie theaters. I am spoiled, and I admit it, but I suspect so are the rest of you. Interactivity is more than a feature of modern life. I think it is bound to become a reflex. Ultimately we start to assume that all media are or should have some back channel. This a reflex that is tailormade for mobile.

After broaching the long tail theme last week, the off-deck mobile content leader Thumbplay contacted me with some interesting usage statistics. That site, which charges a $9.99 a month fee for access to a package of games, wallpapers, ringtones and video, lets users manage their choices mainly via the Web site. The site gets about four to five million uniques a month, says CEO Are Traasdahl, and even the WAP portal gets up to 20 million page views.

Rhythm New Media CEO Ujjal Kohli was in a bold mood when I spoke with him recently about a new rollout of mobile video in the U.K. "I am going after TV budgets," he told me. Many years ago, I recall sitting in iVillage CEO Doug McCormick's office being told the exact same thing. He made the case for the Web's superiority over TV in targeting, day-parts, etc. and I recall raising an eyebrow at his audacity in hoping to steal money from network and cable as early as 2000. Now I know a little better...

My otherwise sweet 15-year-old daughter is an accomplished assassin -- and her father couldn't be more proud. Driving her home from school the other day, I noticed she was locked and loaded into her new Samsung phone. In the two years we have allowed her a cell phone, I never recall my daughter playing a mobile game. But here she was actually mowing down aliens in "Doom RPG." "Die, sucker, die, why don't you?" she seethed while pumping plasma pellets into something with bloody choppers. They grow up so fast.

Anyone trying to stay current with pop culture tastes should take a trip to one of the local fly-by-night Halloween stores. They are indexes not only of the trends in popular media but also the sheer range of tastes. The Jasons, Michael Myers, Freddies and such are to be expected, of course. And what would Halloween be without low-level political satire (this year's Hillary and Rumsfeld masks). But it does my heart good to know that somewhere out there people remember the '50s pin-up Bettie Page, who seems to have her own line of costumes now. There are minor Marvel …

Call me jaded, but I have an aversion to CTIA. I went to the shows for years before mobile became a content play, let alone a marketing platform. I spent a lot of time surfing through (usually over) the tidal wave of acronyms tied to wireless technology, the dizzyingly complex supply chain, and the dense terminology. Wireless tech pitches always sounded to me like parody sketches from Professor Irwin Corey. The show, and wireless telephony culture itself, out-geeked even me.

The mobile industry seems to be responding to recent criticism that, as a marketing platform, it just doesn't offer the kind of reach traditional media buyers need. At the New York OMMA Expo in September, Digitas' Vice President and Media Director Jordan Bitterman said offhandedly about mobile marketing, "It doesn't have the scale ... Our marketers are looking for scale."

One of the core lessons of mobile marketing is how, in the right context, a little goes a long way. In an uncluttered and targeted environment, a small call to action can have a tremendous impact. Dynamic Logic just pushed a case study over to me that showed a 27% "brand favorability" lift from a display ad campaign on a major WAP destination.And now 4Info CEO Zaw Thet tells me that little 40-character SMS ads running in text alerts are pulling down 5% response rates, even in general branding messages. "High end response rates are 22% to 23%," he says.

After losing subscribers and its CEO, Sprint has decided to take its next step forward by looking backward, to the good old days of basic cable. Launching yesterday, The SEE channel (Sprint Exclusive Entertainment) looks and feels like a well-intentioned fledgling TV network trying to be all things to the great big middle of an imagined general demographic.