Messaging: adverts for SMS
Nov 15, 2007
"Coming from a mobile operator background previously I worked on things like mobile email and mobile broadband, and I remember at the time saying: "Well, this is all going to replace everything to do with SMS." In the end we pretty much found that SMS is so well embedded now in the market and so easy to use - so democratic if you like - that it's not going to go away and be replaced by these other services".
Having, as it were, learned the error of his ways, Jote Bassi is now marketing director of Anam, a company that works in the value-added SMS services market. We talked earlier this year with Bassi about SMS in money transfer. Using SMS for financial transactions is hardly new - on the contrary it's a growing force, as the entry into the market of Fronde Anywhere (see May 16 issue), Masabi (interviewed in this issue) and a number of other companies is showing. It does, however, prove that the ubiquity and simplicity of simple texting can still score over many other messaging systems.
Even mobile advertising, if Bassi is correct, may benefit with an SMS component of the sort Anam wants to add to networks. He describes Anam's offering thus: "Once a message is plucked from the network it's run over a sort of media gateway - a piece of technology that will recognise certain key words within the text, for example, and attach an appropriate advert to it." Thus, if I send someone a text suggesting we meet in a named street near a named landmark, the solution is such that the advert placed on that text may be for a restaurant in that area or a promotion going on in a cinema in that road. The permission problem could be overcome by promising money off the user's bill in return for their opting in to an SMS advertising service.
However, although the ad itself may arrive with an SMS it won't necessarily be one itself. Bassi explains: "It could be in the form of text-based ads. It could be in the form of a weblink - and it can be graphical - an MMS type of ad - as well."
He feels that this is, as he says, " a very simple model", and an important point about simplified systems is that you can usually guarantee more of an audience - not just the 16-24 demographic but operators in developing markets for whom this service could be appropriate for an older, but still cost-conscious group. Or as Bassi puts it: "Different countries are at different stages of development when it comes to mobile needs and mobile tariffs. So across borders and across countries there will be segments beyond the teenage segment who will be attracted by this service."
Not that he rejects early adopting teenagers: far from it. In fact his belief is that "early adopters always lead to the mature market, so once teenagers are starting to use this it will start to catch on within other segments and customer bases as well".
And for an advertiser SMS is effective too. Bassi explains: "If you send a direct mail through the post, a lot of the time I'll rip it up before I read it. But if you receive an ad on an SMS, it's a 100 per cent open rate: you're going to open it regardless of whether you want to hear it or not and at least read it before you delete it, which you don't get in other forms of advertising."
But it doesn't end there, Anam is looking at the possibility of marrying up its SMS money transfer service and transactional service with mobile advertising, "so in theory you could look at an advert for a special promotion and actually click and buy it as well - all using your phone and using SMS".
It's too early to predict the level of success of this approach but Anam's efforts are typical of a continuing recognition that if end users like and understand SMS, then we might as well offer more services based on it. After all, only recently the Mobile Data Association offered figures indicating that Britons send more than one billion text messages per week, an increase of 25 per cent on the same time last year.
Of course, at the back of a lot of minds will be the possibility of using SMS to encourage end users to try other services. Anam's proposed weblinks and graphics at least imply that. But one suspects that Anam and others are not planning to sideline the messaging technology that enables it all any time soon. "These other services are great...for certain segments of the market," says Bassi, "but SMS is mass market, democratic and everybody's going to continue to use it."
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For additional information, please contact:
Patrick Smith
Sonus PR
+44 (0)20 7851 4890
