By Thom Kennon

To me, the sweetest thing about mobile marketing is that it has almost nothing to do with advertising. Let me explain.

We are moving through the final stages of what has been a helluva ride these past 15 or so years ? the birth and toddler years, the terrible teens and the increasingly golden years of ?digital.?   

By ?digital? we generally mean ?online? or ?interactive.? Often, we use the term to help ourselves, our clients and our partners differentiate from television, radio, print and out of home ? ?above the line.? If we are honest and candid we usually use it to refer mostly to a fixed number of actual things such as banners, landing pages and Web sites.  

I would argue that something curious has occurred here towards the end of this very full life ?digital? has led. Many of us ended up planning, creating and paying for it the same way we did and do the rest of its marketing forebears. In a word, it became advertising.

Mobile is different. It is pervasive and practically embedded. It is about customer service, entertainment streaming, social networks, content consumption, service delivery, online shopping, news reading or searching and researching.

So, no, mobile is not necessarily going to kill advertising ? in fact in some cases it will be a good choice to deliver it.

But the promise of mobile is so much more, and to be born into the generation of marketers who will imagine and create this new kind of marketing science is to be a very lucky marketing scientist indeed.

Engagement ? the killer KPI
The opportunity to find, reach, nurture and retain our customers through this extraordinarily personal device which spends its merry day in their hands, pockets and purses is extraordinary.

The mobile touch point offers us entrée into the magical realm of the holiest of KPIs (key performance indicators), the one we have all been talking about these past 10 years ? engagement.

The level and degree of engagement we can generate and sustain through mobile is limited only by our creative ability to deliver relevant and contextual value to our consumers through the channel.

Think about the stickiness of some mobile applications ? the three or four you probably have on your phone?s home screen that you could not live without.

Or think about the simple beauty of receiving well-timed, relevant and contextual SMS alerts for your favorite products and service updates.

Marketing into the mash-up
But remember all this engagement through mobile must be ignited and earned within a very crowded user-controlled environment. Think of the tiny screen of your search results, or the mess of mobile applications on your device deck, or the swift streaming tweets flowing across your Tweetdeck.

Mobile is not just the poster child for the post-digital consumer touch point revolution. It is also the consummate example of the evolving consumer interface and the context for an increasingly huge part of our marketing messages: the mash-up. 

The mash-up is the new consumer interface for your post-digital marketing programs, and your new KPI is the Holy Grail itself ? brand engage-ability.

Your marketing efforts into this mash-up will look like no other kind of marketing or certainly ?advertising? you have done in the past, for another reason: control. 

The amount of control we cede to the consumer in how they populate, navigate and activate within their personally controlled mashed-up environment is frightening.

But do not get scared ? get brave. Get post-digital.  

Getting post-digital
Embrace it or not, we are hurtling towards a whole new marketing paradigm.  

The marketers who thrive in this fluxing ecosystem of mashed-up brands are those that first pick up, mold and make their own tools of post digital marketing.  

This is about marketing with as much precision as possible: we cannot always control whose brand is next to whose; who will share our links with whom; and where our ?ads? or our videos or pages, our podcasts or our precious links might travel and how they might get there and what happens next when they do. 

This is a marketing distinguished by something else ? bravery ? because a new type of fresh and transparent bravery will be required along with these new tools. 

Ultimately, though, it is about value. The mash-up brands that win will carry and convey an unassailably authentic value, and a truth about them which gives our consumers reasons to share the good news.    

As these winning brands navigate, inhabit and engage within this dynamic consumer-controlled mix, they are focused singularly on creating compelling reasons and pathways to be shared.

Indeed, ?to be shared? this is the new mantra of our touch-point strategies. 

The brand messaging which survives these engineered insertions with bravery and value will travel well and thrive as they are adapted and refashioned within the mash-up of the new marketing interface, co-engineered by our best customers who, along the way, become our best media as well.

The post-digital marketer quickly finds that messaging ?shares? into the mash-up are not just able to be engineered, but with enough art and craft are both measurable and able to be optimized. 

Planned and implemented with opportunistic success it will unlock a degree of efficiency and value impossible under the old and now-dying rules of traditional advertising. 

This, I argue, is the essential path forward into the future of brand marketing. A post-digital marketing where the value of a click that a consumer mashes and shares ? whether mobile or anywhere else ? is worth infinitely more than a click that simply just clicks through.

Thom Kennon is vice president of strategy at relationship marketing agency Wunderman New York. Reach him at .