Two major issues are making marketers' knees knock today: One, their budgets are under pressure, and two, the dollars they are spending on advertising aren't as effective as they need to be.   This is especially true for marketers in the restaurant space.  In this softening economy, a dollar spent needs to earn several dollars in return—but it isn't.

In any economic downturn, most restaurant chains cut marketing spending first to save money, focusing instead on ingredients and labor. This has the unintended consequence of dimming the lights on the "Welcome" sign just when hungry customers are looking for a good place to eat. This jeopardizes sales and gives competitors an opportunity to win over new clientele.

Online advertising was supposed to be the solution. Targeting was touted as a way to reach the right people at the right time on the right sites, but it hasn't lived up to its promise. The problem is that no matter how "targeted" a site is, it doesn't mean that the person sitting at her computer surfing Web sites has the INTENT to go out that evening for some entertainment and dining.

That all changes with mobile advertising, where the cell phone marries voice and visual technologies in a unique, compelling way to deliver super-targeted and timely messages.

Consider that there are 255 million mobile phones in the United States, and, in a recent survey, about 58 million people said they recalled a mobile advertisement. Half of mobile data subscribers who saw an ad responded to it by sending a text message, clicking on it or calling a specific number. If you connect those dots, it's not hard to see why research firm eMarketer forecasts mobile-messaging advertising revenues will be $1.5 billion this year, up 82 percent from last year, and reach $11 billion in just three more years.  It works.

With mobile advertising, you're getting messages on the most personal of devices—one which most people say they won't leave the house without. Generic ads will not fly for mobile users, but consider an environment in which marketing messages are intimately tied to a user's intent and, in most cases, location.

Imagine a call scenario in which a user seeks a movie show time (demonstrating immediate intent) and gets delivered a short ad from a nearby restaurant.  Surveys show that 50 percent of all moviegoers state that they also visit a dining establishment when going out to a theater.  Now combine that intent with other incentives to entice the caller, such as offering a free dessert with a promotion only good for that day. The user agrees, and a coupon is sent to the caller as a text message to show to the food-server at the restaurant. Unlike other forms of advertising such as TV, radio, newspaper or even online, this type of advertising achieves all four golden attributes that a marketer pines for: geo-targeting, intent-targeting, relevance and timeliness.  All of these attributes are immensely valuable to both the user and the advertiser.

Even if the user chooses not to download the coupon and take up the restaurant's offer, the seed has been planted for this type of interaction in the future. Eventually, users will come to expect this type of location-aware advertising and the incentives (free drinks!) that come with it, and might even call the movie show time phone number just looking to get a compelling restaurant ad and promotion.

Advertising adapts to technology. Brands, in the Industrial Revolution, quickly understood that daily newspapers and their mass audience would be cost-effective ways to spread marketing messages. But over the ensuing decades, they wanted to reach people in more granular ways, so they supplemented their spending by jumping on radio and TV (in part because radio and TV owners— at least for the first few years of technology introduction—were wealthier consumers).

A similar paradigm shift is happening in digital advertising, only with a twist. The luster of Internet advertising is dimming just as a highly focused and personal device is elbowing its way deeper into daily digital life. And in a downturn, it behooves marketers to maximize their budget in the most effective mediums for maximum ROI. It's time for marketers to take advantage of the marriage of voice and visual technologies to deliver, targeted relevant messages to consumers who will value them.

Haldeman is chief marketing officer of voice and visual in-call advertising pioneer Apptera, based in San Bruno, Calif.  Apptera manages more than 50 million calls per year for movie show times, representing more than 120 million people, half of whom are hungry and looking for a good place to eat.