A few years from now, you can expect your trips to the supermarket to be a little different. If you're the parent of young children, for example, don't be surprised if your mobile phone texts you with nappy offers as you walk down the baby aisle. And when you reach the checkout, there's a good chance you'll use an embedded chip in your mobile to pay for your groceries and redeem different electronic coupons. In both cases, The Light Agency (TLA) may well be playing a big part in your visit.

'I'm a serial technology entrepreneur. I've built and sold companies before. But you can never stop learning.'

It sounds like an advanced form of marketing, but according to Marc Lewis, CEO and founder of the award-winning consumer marketing agency, much of this harks back to the era of Green Shield stamps in the 1970s. 'My job as an innovator and an entrepreneur is to use technology to make old-fashioned marketing exercises more efficient,' says Lewis. 'People have had coupons for a long time. And retailers have been doing promotion marketing since the end of the 70s - Green Shield was I guess one of the first players.' What TLA has done is apply mobile technology to these classic marketing techniques.

The company has developed a technology platform called M BAR GO, which acts as a kind of glue connecting a barcode on the consumer's mobile phone with the retailer's electronic point of sale (EPoS) system, and then to a separate database that validates which offers they're qualified to take up. While consumers shop, items are promoted to them based on two factors - a planogram indicating where they are in the store, and a personal shopping profile of each consumer based on their buying history. When they reach the checkout, the sales assistant scans the barcode on their phone - which is effectively their unique user ID - and the coupons are redeemed.

TLA now has 200 household brands from more than a dozen international brand owners signed up to the scheme, and broad experience from a series of pilot programmes including a successful rollout in Hull. The company is heading toward a national rollout to thousands of UK stores in the summer under the banner 'Shop Scan Save' and has also identified the US as a key territory.

So how do you make such an ambitious project happen? With a background as a serial entrepreneur through the dot com era, Lewis makes light of what it took to get TLA to this stage. 'I read a bit of history about retail marketing and I used that to develop technologies that would plot out its future,' says Lewis. 'I write code to some extent, so I was able to map out a functional spec and a proof of concept model. I then commissioned Logica back in 2002 to write a first go at the product to prove it in a point of sale environment.'

Having proved the concept, Lewis set about building up his own team of in-house software engineers. In all, M BAR GO represents about five years of coding and ₤3m of investment: 'We've ploughed a lot of cash into writing the algorithms so far - but that's been necessary and what we have is a very flexible and powerful piece of technology.' Also critical to the success of the platform is that there's no extra investment required - the system works with most existing mobiles and all the leading EPoS systems.

More recently, Lewis has hired a well-respected CTO with a financial services pedigree to take the company's technology platform to the next level. 'He's here to put the process management into the build. He'll make sure everything is put through the due diligence we require to scale at the rate that we are starting to grow. It was important to us that we build security in from the ground up. It's no secret that the desire of M BAR GO is that we move from coupon into full mobile payments at some stage.'

Upwardly mobile

The Light Agency, originally called I-Coupon, has won a host of awards within the mobile and retail industry, including a listing in the O2 '50 To Watch in Mobile' line-up. In particular, the company has demonstrated its ability to build up profiles of members of its schemes, segmenting customers according to their shopping behaviour. 'What we don't do is send a random coupon that says 'Here's 50p off a coke, and here's another ₤1 off a pint of Guinness'. Instead, we activate a user identifier on the handset, which says 'Hi I'm Mark and I've got a coupon'. That is activated at point of sale, it speaks to a database, and it looks up rules and offers that are available to that consumer at that particular date. So it's a different approach to the old economy paper coupon model.'

It also differs radically to traditional database marketing which relies on aggregate metrics such as age, sex and location, rather than individual profiles. 'I could have a million different members, each with a unique set of offers based on their historical shopping data. We capture basket data in real time and what that means is that all offers are unique. The system learns and grows.' If this sounds a bit Big Brother, Lewis is keen to point out that it's all opt-in marketing. He acknowledges that there will be different levels of take-up from different consumers - as well as the 'push' offers that are sent out according to consumer profiles, some individual members might request specific offers while they're in a store by sending a text to TLA. 'We have a far more precise, measurable and flexible marketing tool than the old economy models.'

US funding

TLA attended a g2i event at the British Library in the autumn of 2006 and then met with the g2i team to review his business in detail. Lewis says they gave the company more focus and confidence that it had a good business.

Following the business review, Lewis was given the opportunity to pitch his proposition at a g2i 'Meet the Companies' event in September. He found the experience informative, despite having been through the cycle of business set-up and sale several times. 'I'm a serial technology entrepreneur. I've built and sold companies before. But you can never stop learning.'

Despite the apparent appeal of M BAR GO, however, Lewis admits to some frustration at the time it has taken to convince the market and investors. 'As an innovator you will always get it sooner than anybody else, because you conceived of the idea whereas others might not recognise its potential until it's better formed. Sometimes that means repositioning the message or waiting for people to catch up, and sometimes it's just a state of mind thing and you can change it.' In TLA's case, the answer was to scale back the amount of funding it was seeking in the UK and focus more on the US, where it has found better traction. The company is going back to the market for a much larger funding round and has appointed an investment broker on the US West Coast. 'US investors are more hungry for mobile than the UK. They are more visionary. Generally, people fear being first movers in the UK.'

However, he stresses that the company has no plans to quit the UK. 'By 2008, the majority of our revenues will come from the US. But some of the greatest retailers in the world are in the UK, like Tesco. And the UK is ahead of the curve in mobile innovation. So it's important we retain a UK focus.'

Marc Lewis was talking to David Longworth of Webster Buchanan Research