Last week, a Google Android prototype was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, giving the industry its first peek at the software that aims to bring the power of desktop computing to handsets. Google wants Android to become the predominate operating system for what is expected to be the world's largest communications channel. Android's open-source platform allows developers to create any number of applications for mobile phones, which are expected to debut in the second half of this year.

Android may finally offer portable rich-media capabilities, allowing brands to integrate online, text and e-mail marketing into a lower-cost smart phone that fits into consumers' pockets. Android has its competitors, but marketers, already familiar with Google's ad-revenue model, are drooling over the software's possibilities for fostering trackable, one-on-one relationships with customers.

"This will be the first step toward making phones truly open," says Pat Conroy, U.S. consumer products leader at Deloitte & Touche. "You're going to see things [in the U.S.] ratchet up very quickly in terms of capabilities, as they are in Japan and Asia. Bar code scanners will be on phones, Web-browsing capabilities truly will be 10 times what they are now, and things like the iPhone will look like a baby toy in two, three, four years. All of the online research (buying-decision info) is moving from your desktop to the point of sale via people's handheld phones. Cell phones soon will be 'sell' phones, because these capabilities are going to exponentially rise, and it brings countless possibilities for companies in terms of how to reach out to consumers."

Conroy adds: "We're seeing a market turn transparent in front of our eyes, and it's going to be a time of high risk as well as high opportunity for a lot of companies in how they deal with it. The old days of 'new and improved' won't carry the day in the future."

The Android platform could potentially work in other environments, outside of mobile devices. If successful, it could take the Internet to a new previously unimaginable level, surrounding consumers wherever they may be. So the question for marketers becomes more urgent than ever: Lip service aside, how well do they understand word-of-mouth communications? Most say they've bought into the idea that consumers increasingly control the conversations surrounding their brands. But how well are they listening to and shaping those discussions, in light of the technological advances that are making that form of communication ever more dominant?

"Most brands do a pathetic job listening to consumers vis-a-vis existing tools, whether it's through 800 numbers, call centers, 'contact us' feedback forms," says Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics (owned by Adweek parent the Nielsen Co.). "The reason I say 'pathetic' is those listening tools aren't terribly assimilated into the new Web 2.0 culture, where people talk with audios, photos, videos. Most companies assume consumers speak in one language and that language is text, when consumers actually speak in a much more robust language."

Blackshaw argues that client customer-service operations should become the new industry media department.

"There is such a viral effect being created by what brands do -- whether it's through products that work, customer service, the way employees behave -- that we also need to listen to understand the cause and effect between brand experience and consumer conversation," he says. "Things consumers may have otherwise not talked about 10 years ago are now being talked about with great intensity, partly because the barriers to feedback have gone down so dramatically. The big challenge for advertisers: It's both the pro and con of word of mouth. The conversation overwhelms the ad spend. At some point, if the conversation is running against the brand spending, where is the ROI?"

Media campaigns, with their boxcar numbers, are finite. With the amplification borne of a new digital voice, one consumer's opinion lives indefinitely in cyberspace. In a 2007 survey from Deloitte's Consumer Products Group, almost two-thirds of respondents -- 62 percent -- said they read consumer-generated reviews on the Internet. The good news for marketers: 82 percent of that group said they subsequently made a purchase. The bad news? Just as many of them said the reviews changed their opinion -- and they bought something else -- as said they purchased their original choice of product (43 percent in each case).