For best results, approach the planning and implementation of mobile campaigns with the same rigour as you would every other medium. While traditional planning insight often suggests mobile as a smart option, fully understanding the mobile consumer requires detailed analysis before moving forward. You need to be crystal clear about your campaign objectives too, such as to drive sales, raise awareness or deliver engagement.

TGI reveals interesting insights about mobile consumers with its ability to cross-tab an audience with mobile usage. This helps build a platform of consumer insight on which to plan a campaign. For example, looking at 25 to 34-year-old men, TGI tells us they are almost 150% more likely to use mobile internet and twice as likely to visit sports and news content as all adults.

MMetrics research is a mobile consumer panel which enables us to look in more granular detail at how a particular audience uses mobile. We know from TGI that 25 to 34-year-old men visit news and sport more than the average and MMetrics tells us how many - in this example we see more than 800 000 25 to 34-year-old men accessed sport and over 700 000 accessed news in Jan 2009. We can see 750 000 accessed Facebook, too. So we start to build our consumer picture even further.

Proprietary research is useful when you need to investigate audience habits and patterns. In the above example, we know our audience index well for mobile internet usage and is interested in sport. Operator research shows peaks in sports access on a Saturday afternoon, helping us up-weight impressions accordingly. Research such as Orange Exposure 2 indicates where people tend to consume mobile media too, thus enhancing an already detailed picture.

So what sites do our heavy mobile internet users (with a liking for news and sport) visit? MMetrics ranks our audience against the key operator portals, both in terms of absolute numbers and total profile. So we can pinpoint a network with smaller absolute reach but with the best targeting efficiency, for example.

For many large off-portal sites, however, agencies currently rely on publisher data. The GSMA figures, due to be released in H2 2009, offer the chance for more rigorous planning against sites such as Sky Sports, MSN and Yahoo!. Until their release we can up-weight sports and news content channels (for example) which reflect our audience's browsing habits within these portals.

Different networks offer different ways of targeting consumers. Simple demographic (age and gender) targeting is available on some networks. You can also target by billing address - useful when you want to isolate mobile advertising to a specific region. Interestingly, it is possible to serve ads to specific devices - clients such as Dell who need to reach a business audience can serve advertising just to Blackberries.

All mobile advertising campaigns must have a dedicated destination site. It's no good sending consumers to a full web page on a mobile handset - develop a mobile-friendly site. Mobile sites render quickly and correctly on all devices, providing an optimised browsing experience - true too for iPhone. Plus, a mobile site can host video or audio content, connect to maps, offer one-click calls or trigger brochures - whatever brings the campaign fully to life.

When reporting on campaign performance we currently rely on weekly and total figures submitted by the publishers. Usually this includes: impressions served, number of clicks and achieved click-through rates. To maintain appropriate checks and balances, we can cross-reference these numbers with a client's mobile site analytics.