Customer information is the key to mobile operators gaining a significant share of burgeoning mobile advertising revenues, industry experts agued today.

Andrew Kloeden, a consultant at analyst firm Analysys, said: "Mobile operators have an opportunity to gain significant new revenues from mobile advertisers, which may be willing to pay a premium for access to a well-segmented audience."

He added that several potential new mobile advertising business models are emerging, including:

"Mobile operators have the potential to use customer information to gain revenues from mobile advertising beyond simple data carriage," said Kloeden.

"Provided that a business model which does not bypass the operators' networks emerges as dominant, mobile advertising may represent a source of significant average revenue per user gains from mobile data services."

Mobile operators must find ways to successfully exploit marketing, data-mining and content aggregation capabilities if they are to generate significant new revenues from mobile data services, he added.