I've just come across this article covering a mobile marketing campaign from the U.S. fast food franchise "Jack in the Box", using mobile coupons to attract hungry customers to its restaurants across six U.S. states. More from the article:

Three separate mobile ads are currently running on the idle screens of consumers’ handsets within select U.S. markets. To power the campaign, Jack in the Box Inc. tapped idle-screen advertising services firm Mobile Posse Inc., which is guaranteeing advertisers a minimum click-through-rate of 10 percent.

The Jack in the Box mobile coupon offers include a buy-one, get-one-free promotion for Jack’s Classic sandwiches, a free combination upgrade with purchase of any burger or sandwich and a free pita with purchase of any Coke beverage.

Delivered at noon, mid-afternoon or early evening, the mobile ads containing the coupons are designed to drive traffic to select Jack in the Box locations for lunch, an afternoon snack or dinner.

Interactive campaigns using mobile coupons are a great way to attract new customers, especially when the coupons are delivered timely, in such fashion that will match patterns in their daily lives. For example, it is a great marketing campaign to be able to send out messages at around 13.00 (for Greece -- different countries have different eating habits) to invite hungry folks to your restaurant using a small freebie.

Obviously the next step is to be able to identify between individuals and personalise the service, so that you send the message a small while before each individual's lunch time.

I would really like to hear how this turns out in numbers, because a bet to be won is how many users will eventually download the application onto their mobile phone (assuming the mobile application has been designed to run on a wide variety of mobile phones).

Also, another possible inhibiting factor would be the range of 'free content' (such as mobile coupons, mobile offers, etc) that will eventually be made available to the consumer, because the adoption of the service depends greatly on this. If you download the application and there were no offers, you wouldn't keep on using it, right?

My point is that I hope a large number of content providers pick up on this, because I think it is a great mobile advertising service, assuming, of course, it reaches a wide enough audience.

If anyone from Mobile Posse comes across this, I'd be interested in finding out rough numbers of content providers, consumers, use statistics etc, if you can give them out.