By Lara Albert

Mass-market advertising is not driving exploration of mobile data services ? it is costly, inefficient and does not solve the problem of making mobile data experiences easily discoverable to skeptical prospective users unaware of the potential value.

Traditional marketing approaches might accelerate mobile data usage if using mobile data was an activity that we understood as well as eating, deciding what to wear and driving a car.

But even early adopters are just barely getting their heads around the phenomenon of mobile data.

The reality is that it is difficult to do mass marketing when the category of consumption you are promoting is not one the target audience has ever experienced. 

Power tip
Prospective mobile data users need to experience mobile data in their own lives if we ever expect to accelerate adoption of smartphones, mobile Internet and mobile value-added services such as television, music, social networking and, yes, applications.

Accelerating adoption really comes down to getting prospective customers to experience what early adopters already know.

If you hang out with early adopters of mobile data services and study their daily routines, the first thing that you notice is that mobile data is not just about using the Internet on a mobile phone, shifting desktop computing onto a mobile platform or even the next great application.

It is really about a global revolution in how people make decisions about almost anything, just about anywhere.

The power of mobile data is that it allows people to make decisions that were not even possible before and, as a result, live their lives in entirely new ways.

For example, how to avoid an accident that happened just as you left the office to head home from work.

These new kinds of decisions are sprouting up by the thousands every year as early adopters realize they can start to live their lives differently, because of their access to mobile data.

But if you try to market the power of mobile data services to someone who has never used them before, they will just laugh, and say what we have always said at the cusp of major technological revolutions: ?Who could possibly need that?? They said it about radio, automobiles and mobile phones.

Eventually, of course, these nay-sayers do come around. But it can take years.

Savoir faire
One way to accelerate adoption is for wireless carriers to allow prospective mobile users to experience, first hand, the power of mobile data in a way that empowers their everyday decision-making. 

The first step in this strategy is to use the rich customer intelligence and behavioral data that lies deep within a service provider?s systems to profile actual mobile use occasions and then predict their occurrence in real time.

We know that service providers have all the data to determine when a young adult is most likely to purchase a new music track or download a ringtone, or predict that ?the tech executive? is most likely to be traveling abroad the week after next, requiring routine stock market updates, craving sports scores on his favorite home teams, and searching for a local entertainment guide.

So why would a service provider wait for an end user to decide on their own to access the services available to them instead of proactively delivering a relevant mobile data experience to them, right when they need it?

The second step is the delivery of mobile experiences to end users on specific occasions when they will find these services the most useful, relevant and compelling.

That is, using contextual marketing to precisely target the right data experience (what) to the right person (who) at the right moment (when) and location (where) regarding a decision that really matters (why). 

This involves taking all of the data about an occasion and using analytics to determine the best offer to present to an individual consumer for a specific occasion and, then, actually delivering it in the context of the moment when it matters most. 

Instead of marketing a data plan to someone who has yet to realize the value of mobile data in their everyday life, or promoting a free trial to an audience whose majority does not need the information at that moment, carriers need to encourage trial of highly relevant content and applications.

It comes down to knowing what an individual customer really wants and presenting it to them at just the right time. Telecoms carriers have all the data they need ? it is just a matter of putting it to use.

Lara Albert is senior director of global marketing at Globys, a Seattle-based provider of contextual marketing services for telecommunications. Reach her at .