We may know pretty soon if zonal marketing is all of these things. It will shortly go on trial as part of Vodafone's current advertising development program, which the company says is designed to provide customers with "relevant and engaging experiences" and advertisers with "effective and responsive marketing platforms".

New tech from big players

In addition to zonal marketing, Vodafone is developing or already testing a number of other services, including:

• Testing full-screen ads delivered to opt-in customers in the seconds before they answer a call or read a text message

• Researching the acceptance and effectiveness of branded apps and widgets

• Trialling an enhanced mobile browser

• Vodafone myCampaign, on online self-service platform for mobile advertisers, which is currently being developed in Germany and the Czech republic

Alcatel-Lucent and Navteq recently unveiled technologies aimed at personalising ads by targeting users at their real-time locations. And Alcatel-Lucent, in partnership with Placecast, launched a location-based ad platform based on the same tracking technology as the Vodafone system. Navteq is introducing a similar location-based platform for the Nokia Navigator app.

What is zonal marketing?

For starters, it has been the subject of keen research for at least several years because of perceived shortcomings in standard LBS. "Traditional location-based services determine the current location of a given person or a given set of persons in order to process location-dependent information. That use does not cover the full range that is conceivable for these services," wrote Dianna Weiss, of the Mobile & Distributed Systems Group at Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, in a doctoral proposal on zone services.

As one example, she describes a scenario in which someone wants to visit a leisure spot but first wants to find out which of her friends may be there. The tracking service on standard LBS has to locate all of her mobile friends, filter out those who are at not her chosen destination, then feed the filtered information back to her.

Zone-based services work differently. In one proposed format, people on your friends list are automatically logged into a zone as soon as they enter it. A zone-based service doesn't first have to locate your friends for you because in theory it already knows where they all are.

Similarly, as soon as you enter the zone of your favoured destination - a restaurant, maybe - you may receive a message or an ad telling you what's on special for lunch there, just 250 metres away from where you are now.

The technical differences between normal and zonal LBS may be subtle and highly technical. This isn't the place to go into research on routers that exchange search "tickets" or patent applications incorporating mechanisms that detect delicate fluctuations in signal frequencies. What matters is that all of the developments in zone-based technology promise to make location-based services and advertising slicker.

What's at stake

Quick answer? Money.

Mobile devices, operators and apps that deliver the best, most enjoyable and most personalised service are likely to win more customers. The ones that generate the most productive responses will more likely win the hearts and wallets of advertisers. If zonal services and zonal marketing deliver the goods to users and advertisers alike, then the players who get in early and get it right stand to gain financially from the new technology.

Zonal marketing, like all forms of mobile advertising we've already seen, is unlikely to leap in and instantly conquer the market. There are too many potential ad spenders waiting to be convinced in a big way.

"At a high level, I keep seeing new efforts related to location-based advertising, and these latest ones are very encouraging. But I don't also hear about companies that should want to advertise putting big budgets behind campaigns involving location on mobile phones just yet," says Neil Strother, a mobile analyst at Forrester. "It seems like this tactic is in perpetual 'waiting to take off' mode. I sense it's going to take a few years to build that kind of audience."

More encouragingly, Mick Rigby, MD of the Yodel Digital agency, acknowledges that location-based advertising adds an intriguing element to mobile advertising, even if it is still in its infancy. He comments: "It's one of the golden bullets of mobile. It's one of the things that will make the mobile web famous, and it will be a key driver in the progress of the medium. When it becomes easy to buy, I think it will really begin to take off."