Advertisers reach consumers through text messages
A new trend is hitting the advertising world in a big way: text messaging. More and more consumers are opting to receive promotional material, sports scores, weather updates, and news stories by text message, and marketers are seeing the possibility of attaching their brand to these messages. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, text message advertising is expected to reach $1.5 billion by 2008, an increase of 82% from 2007. This trend is likely to grow as more and more cell phone users embrace text messaging as a source of information and entertainment.
One company who has seen the writing on the wall is Coors Brewing. As a sponsor of the NFL draft, they made the most of text messages that were sent to football fans. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “Coors Brewing’s Coors Light beer recently added a text-message component to its traditional sponsorship of the NFL Draft. Football fans opted to receive draft alerts, and each message contained a squib about Coors Light.” The advertising component of the message usually takes the form of a one-liner, like “Coors Light: Official Sponsor of the NFL Draft,” or something along those lines. The ad must be kept short and sweet, since text messages can be no more than 160 characters, most of which are reserved for content.
One of the major players in the text message advertising industry is 4INFO, a content provider which has been actively chasing advertising dollars. As their website states, “Our mission is to keep people in the know, on the go…Mobile is becoming the advertising industry’s fastest growing media channel, and 4INFO offers the most cost effective way to reach this technically savvy and affluent audience through their mobile phones.” 4INFO will incorporate marketing messages into their news updates, search results, stock quotes, or celebrity gossip feeds. Any cell phone user can subscribe to their updates free of charge (though your service provider may charge for texting).
4INFO claims to reach as many as 8 million users a month, and they usually divide the revenue generated with the advertiser 60-40. With search ads and display ads lagging behind text messaging in popularity, many firms are taking up 4INFO’s offer to intersperse content with marketing. One of the reasons text message advertising is so popular is the impressive “click-through” rate. Industry experts claim that between 1% and 10% of users engage with text message ads, a remarkable increase over web banners.
Perhaps this is because the technology is new and we haven’t learned to ignore them yet, but there may be another reason. The vast majority of those who receive text message ads have signed up to do so. In the case of 4INFO’s clients, the message is secondary to content, but it’s prominent and pertinent. People want this content sent to their cell phones, and they have essentially invited advertisers into their mobile lives. Though the trend of high click-through rates may be a passing phase, the era of text message advertising has just begun to stretch its wings.
By Haley January Eckels
