Mobile advertising - What? When? How?

The what about Mobile ads is clear - advertisements on the mobile phone. Be it ad sent over an sms, banner ad on the WAP portal, or applications like Affle's SMS2.0 with ads displayed while composing an sms or a jingle CRBT that you hear when you call someone instead of a song ... they are all ads.

When? By when I mean when will mobile advertising go mainstream. Thats a million dollar question. Even the Googles and Microsofts of the world are trying to get an answer to this question. With digital advertising at a small INR 500 cr industry, it is unlikely that mobile which is generally a subset of digital (the other bigger subset being online advertising) will be bigger than this. But then, we cannot forget that in a country with 52 mn internet users and only about 5 mn broadband connections, there are about 350 mn mobile subscribers (we have no count of how many actually use the mobile phone if we take into account multiple households with only one mobile). Mobile advertising might be the disruptive idea that might change the landscape. I don't say this. I have read and reread and again reread about this. And I also sort of believe in this.

How? I think SMS is definitely going to be big. IVR with ads will be another market. WAP - it will pick up. And I think even though only the rich guys will access mobile internet, these are the guys who everyone wants to target to sell their products. So medium is irrelevant. But it is bound to happen. 1 year? 2 years? or 3 years? My answer - one of these three. But definitely not beyond.