Last month I attended a luncheon in Chicago hosted by the Business Marketing Association, which had as its guest speaker Geoffrey Frost, the chief marketing officer of Motorola. Because Frost is an affable and entertaining speaker, what was essentially one big commercial for Motorola didn't come off that way. Instead, it was a demonstration of an established company in the wireless sector using innovative marketing techniques to transform its image and reinvent its brand. Anyone listening to Frost and watching Motorola's ad spots — which ranged from women dancing in their underwear to a phone booth stuffed with the likes of Madonna, Iggy Pop and Biggie Smalls — could rightly walk away thinking that Motorola must know a thing or two about how to sell wireless.

I walked away thinking that. I also walked away wondering why service providers can't sell wireless that way — why, with their ownership of networks that produce the hippest and most sought-after communications services in the world, they still insist on waging cut-rate price battles and using claims of thorough network coverage to sell their services.

For the cover story of this issue of Wireless Review, our editorial staff got exclusive access to market research conducted by the Seattle firm M:Metrics that outlines some of the hottest data and multimedia applications for wireless networks. The resulting story delves into the potential that exists for service providers to either add those apps to existing service suites and take advantage of pent-up demand or continue to reap the benefits of already popular services. But whether the companies that provide those services to consumers will be able to create a message enticing enough to get their customers to pay for and use those applications is another story altogether.

Some industry analysts say that carriers don't need to be innovative in their marketing approaches because wireless consumers make their choices about service providers, devices and applications separately and for different reasons. Carriers are driven by the desire to get people on their networks and feel that the addition of new revenue-generating applications will come later. But it isn't, in many cases. Maybe if they injected the same kind of style into their marketing approaches as some of their device suppliers do, that revenue add would come up front when the carrier makes the initial sale.

I write this on the eve of the CTIA's Wireless IT & Entertainment show in San Francisco, which quickly has developed a reputation for flaunting the sexiest of what wireless has to offer in new wireless services. Here's hoping this year's event will inspire the wireless carriers to use something other than the cheapest bucket plan on the block to get their customers to buy those apps.