The mobile ad market, stymied by technical and consumer tolerance problems, on Wednesday gave some indication that it may be finding its stride with two announcements that leverage the market's strengths.

CBS Mobile and Loopt, a social mapping and communications service, announced a partnership that will allow CBS to incorporate awareness of the consumer's location in its mobile advertising campaigns.

And flush from a recent cash infusion, mobile advertising specialist Ad Infuse introduced a new business unit that will leverage the iPhone's unique capabilities and its well-heeled subscribers to deliver multimedia ad campaigns.

Through its partnership with Mountain View, California-based Loopt, a VC-backed firm that markets a location-aware technology, CBS Mobile, the network's mobile arm, will offer advertisers the ability to target cell phone users based on their location.

Consumers in or near a particular mall for instance could be targeted by ads for stores or products sold in that mall.

"Marketers love the idea of location-based advertising because it is highly targeted and consumers can respond to a call to action in a number of different ways," said David Chamberlain, an analyst with In-Stat.

Mobile phone users can make a call in response to an ad, get information about a product from the web, or be ushered directly to a store or a restaurant through navigation or maps, he said.

The CBS ads are not sent via SMS, which consumers can find intrusive, but appear on mobile web sites the consumer visits.

"We have been in the driver's seat in helping to make mobile advertising take off," said Cyriac Roeding, executive vice president of CBS Mobile. "Advertisers are trying to optimize the efficiency of their media spend and location-based ads do exactly that."

San Francisco-based Ad Infuse, which announced a $12 million funding two weeks ago, will leverage the iPhone's visual capabilities and its well-heeled subscribers to deliver multimedia ad campaigns to cell phone users.

The mobile ad market has been slowed by a number of problems including multiple standards, handsets, technologies, carriers policies, and low consumer tolerance that have made mobile advertising technology difficult and expensive to deploy.

To date mobile ads have attracted only one percent of the overall global expenditure on advertising, but a number of startups have made significant technical inroads in the still-emerging market.