I was speaking yesterday with Cheryl Platt of EFX Media, a terrific marketing and media company based in Alexandria, VA. Cheryl is Senior Business Development Executive at EFX and, more to my immediate point, thinks about things a lot and creatively. Both Cheryl and EFX create targeted internal and external communications strategies for companies, with a great strength in video. On this point, I was asking Cheryl about her iPhone, or as Cheryl calls it, her “third screen”. I had never heard the term, so I wanted to learn more. Turns out there’s quite a bit more to learn!

The “third screen” isn’t a new term, and in fact AOL has co-opted the term with its “Third Screen Media” division acquired last year. If you run a Google search on the term, you’ll see a smattering of AOL press releases owning the SEO field, not surprisingly, but also some interesting learning on the subject. I don’t fault AOL for exploiting its brand, and in fact, admire the pro-activeness in charting the new territory.

It’s called the “third” screen in reference to the first (the television) and second (computer) screens. Nothing fancy here, and I suppose, fairly obvious. The neat thing about mobile is its push to become somewhere in between numbers 1 and 2, as broadband evolves and the user experience on mobile becomes increasingly ubiquitous.

You know, it’s so much more than just a phone anymore.

“Third screen” is an advertising industry term and advertising was the context meant by Cheryl’s reference. AOL is in the vanguard of a trend in advertising but certainly not alone there. Michael Collins of WPP Worldwide’s Kinetic Mobile spoke with our Media Future Now group over the summer about Kinetic’s fantastic mobile-only campaigns with Virgin America and others. The idea isn’t all that complicated: Customize ads for the cell phone screen or, in the case of the iPhone, customized for the iPhone screen in particular. As the Silicon Alley Insider puts it, “The technology will allow sites in the Advertising.com ad network to detect a visit from an iPhone and serve an ad specially tailored to the screen.” Pretty cool, pretty simple.

The thinking behind the idea isn’t all that complicated either: Mobile is where the readers will be. (Brilliant!) So much of the mobile firepower in advertising is focused on the iPhone with its 2% market share (although disproportionately larger mobile web share), and this will undoubtedly evolve.

Peter Suciu blogs about where mobile may be going, writing about AT&T’s Technology Showcase last month with its demos of “why didn’t they do that before” applications for mobile phones. I think the gadgetry is neat, and when you can walk into Filene’s Basement in Washington and have your Bluetooth instantly serve you up a Filene’s promo you may feel highly integrated with your marketplace. (Michael Collins of Kinetic suggested this example.) For the broader market, though, I’d wonder if the ideas of things like Mobile Voice Search are more utilitarian and typical of what might transform devices beyond the early adapters and gadget-geeks.

Nevertheless, Rider Research in January this year reported that “Nokia says 25% of entertainment on mobile devices will come from online communities by 2012.” This, to me, is the tip of the iceberg of both what the interactive world will look like in 5 years AND the technological and legal problems faced by content providers. Everyone thinks they know what happened earlier this summer when See what happens when Hasbro and Mattel shut down Scrabulous on Facebook. Well, yes, an immediate cease and desist legal game exploded and a popular application was killed or forced underground.

But this episode is clearly not over or clearly not the last of its kind. A really interesting problem about a truly global, interactive community-based communications forum is the same problem as has always infested social media: What happens when copyright and trademark protection gets thrown into the hands of a fabulously diffuse world of users instead of content creators? More to come on this.