Helen has a good post on participation TV as part of the mobile marketing mix: "And at last, this year, we’re beginning to see more interesting ways of interacting with consumers via mobile leveraging the popularity of key TV shows. "

Oh yes. I'm keeping fingers crossed that I'll be able to talk about something we're doing in this area soon. In many ways mobile makes a better tool for interacting with TV than the "red button":

• It's personal, not social - so many individuals can interact at the same time (and hey, for many TV is a social activity);
• There's a billing mechanism built in (as there is in some, but not all, iTV infrastructures);
• It's independent of the whole TV value chain; you don't need to butter up Sky, NTL, etc. to add an interactive element to your TV property if you do it via mobile;
• It lets viewers engage with a programme even when they're not in front of the TV;
• It lets players interact in many ways; sending text triggers, via "remote control" Java MIDlets, sending in photos, video... you name it;

Of course there are problems in enabling this kind of interactivity (how do you scale up web services to handle a massive volume of simultaneous users in a restricted timeframe?) but they aren't insurmountable.

But I *would* say all that, wouldn't I... ;)