For years now, mobile marketing executives have been telling me that clients always come to them asking to "get into mobile" without really knowing why. Portraying themselves as heroes saving befuddled, unhip brands still dusty with Stone Age media ash, the narrative plays out the same way every time. The mobile-wise guru helps these Neanderthals determine their real "marketing goals," and implement "innovative solutions" that "leverage the unique properties of mobile." Within weeks they have taken Trog the hairy-toed brand manager from his "Gotta get me some of that mobile stuff" ignorance into hip young text-to-win campaigns that place him …

One of the best insights to come from the OMMA Mobile panels last Thursday was that agencies -- creatives especially -- are not yet very excited about the platform's possibilities. The phone just doesn't seem to offer the kind of palette that creative directors are accustomed to in video or even the large, lush page of a glossy print magazine.

To read some of my correspondence lately, you would think that mobile Web sites are dying a slow death. In response to my call for panel questions at OMMA Mobile (that is happening today as we speak, by the way), a number of people asked about full Web browsing on mobile devices. More than a few of you think that made-for-mobile sites soon will be obsolete. I am not on board that train.

Maybe I was watching the wrong game on Sunday. My understanding from people who know sports better than I is that there was only one game of note this weekend, so I guess I was watching the Super Bowl. Funny, that. Here I was waiting to see how marketers leveraged this signature marketing event of the year on a mobile medium that was present in the pockets of every sentient being watching the game. Silly me.

.Some Super Bowl advertisers and marketing partners have had the foresight to promote their mobile tie-ins as they do their coming ad spots. But in most cases, we will be surprised by Super Bowl ads that prompt us to dial and short code in for more information. I will spend the day as I did last year, surrounded by three or four cell phones ready to test out as many of these little on-air bugs as I can to see if anything comes of them.

For several years now I have been asking what apparently is the worst question anyone could ask in the wireless media world: Do all publishers need to be mobile? I have asked this question of just about every panel I have moderated, and just about every mobile marketing company, aggregator and publisher I have interviewed, and I have yet to get an insightful answer.

Along with my hairline and stamina, I left behind the perennial question "How much TV do we really need?" a long time ago. As the morning shows get piped onto digital billboards in Times Square and Food Network snippets keep me from reading the tabloids on checkout lines (what's up with Britney, anyway?), it is apparent now that there never is, never will be, enough TV. It may fragment. It may get time-shifted. It may even get parsed into segments we mash up on our own. But it is not going away. As longtime industry analyst Paul Kagan told me …

Getting the questions right, I think, is half the battle at a conference. Way too many attendees come up to me after a panel to tell me what they would have liked to ask. Audience inhibition -- or just that fear of asking the bad question -- often suppresses the issues that conference audiences really want answered. And so, before the inhibiting crowds gather at OMMA Mobile, I want to ask readers to front-load the program with some of their own questions.

A little known piece of media history is that actual TV programming started a good decade before the platform grabbed American audiences in the later 1940s and early 1950s. But new media no longer get this private gestation period. In an age of VC-funded projects and see-what-sticks business models, the audience is the media lab rat. The Internet spent nearly a decade thrashing about for proper formats and models, and it still isn't settled yet. But this time new platforms like streaming media, podcasting, and mobile evolve quickly and noticeably in the consumer's own hands.

Now that I have gone from hopelessly un-socialized academic geek to, well, hopelessly un-socialized media geek, I dip back into the classroom from time to time. You miss the gum-snapping sorority sisters, sleeping And so when I was doing a guest lecture and Q&A the other day with a room of college students, I asked them about their own tech use. Lesson No. 1: Apple has got it made. In answer to another question, I was surprised to see so little mobile Web use.