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With last week’s release of the highest grossing movie ever, Avatar, the marketing engines were at full speed promoting the epic science fiction masterpiece. But despite a strong marketing presence on television, radio, print and online, distributor Twentieth Century Fox chose to omit mobile as a marketing channel.

In some fairness to Twentieth Century Fox, I can understand them being a little gun shy with mobile channels. After all, they were recently on the wrong end of a Unites States District Court case ruling that found them to be in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act when it sent unsolicited SMS messages to customers to promote the DVD release of its movie “Robots.” However, completely ignoring mobile as a marketing channel is an overreaction that comes with some high opportunity cost.

Take, for instance, the innovative “Create your own Avatar” feature on the website. By uploading a picture of yourself, you can generate an Avatar that resembles a blue, tribal you. While this is interesting online, think of how much more traffic could have been generated if there was a mobile version that allowed you to send in an MMS message with a picture of yourself, and it would send back the generated Avatar? Couple that with calls to action on TV ads, billboards, online, etc, and you have the making of what could have been a highly successful mobile campaign.